[wplug] Re: REMINDER: Great Guests and Great Topics at this week's Pittsburgh Ruby User Group meeting 1.3 on Thursday, April 19.

Cameron McBride cameron.mcbride at gmail.com
Wed Apr 18 11:59:43 EDT 2007


Greetings All,

My "heavy lifting with Ruby" discussion and examples of extending ruby
can be confusing if  one is not familiar with C.  Rather than
obscuring the forest by focusing on the trees - I'd recommend
listening as a proof of concept on how it can be done rather than
trying to run examples if you're not going to be extending ruby on
your own.

That said, there are two recommendations of ruby libraries to play
with that I will discuss in my talk. They are listed in order, so
installing just (1) is fine (or just the 2nd one).

1) NArray
  http://rubyforge.org/projects/narray/
  If you use the one-click installer, there is a pre-compiled windows
version at:
    http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/rb-gsl-win/
    (only grab the narray stuff)

2) RubyInline
  http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinline/
  This *does* work on *nix, OSX and windows platforms, but see below
for details.

I will discuss why I chose these, and their uses during my talk.

If anyone is interested, after my talk I will provide the code for the
examples I used.   I will also be happy to discuss configuration
issues for people trying to get any of this working.

Cameron

p.s. Ruby extensions become difficult because one needs to use the
same compiler that ruby was compiled with.  A C compiler is necessary.
 The one-click installer, a typical version of ruby for windows, uses
MS VC 6.0.  Additionally, several environment variables have to be set
correctly.  On any unix/linux box, the configuration is dead simple
(since the tools and compiler are almost always integrated into that
environment, one gets it for free).


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