Great job! Hope more and more C/C++ code will be replaced with FFI ; )

On Oct 26, 2:45 am, John Croisant <jac...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings, FFI-ers
>
> I've finally released the first FFI-powered version of Rubygame! I was
> able to completely eliminate all the C code for Rubygame, which has
> already made it a lot easier for users on all platforms to install,
> since no compilation is needed anymore. And of course, there's the
> added bonus for me of being able to develop in all Ruby. :-D
>
> You can read the full announcement on the Rubygame blog. (If you get
> an application error on my blog, please try again later. Rails has
> been acting up lately.)
>
>  http://blog.rubygame.org/articles/2009/10/24/rubygame-2-6-released
>
> Gems are available on Rubyforge ("gem install rubygame"), and are
> known to work on MatzRuby (1.8.6, 1.8.7, 1.9.1) as well as JRuby
> (1.3.1, 1.4.0RC2). However, JRuby users need to first install the ffi
> stub gem [1] to resolve the gem dependencies. Also, I'm afraid JRuby
> users on Mac are out of luck until a JRuby equivalent of RSDL [2] is
> written.
>
>   [1]http://github.com/ffi/ffi-jruby
>   [2]http://github.com/knu/rsdl
>
> I haven't been able to test it on Rubinius, but in theory it should
> work if the FFI interface is compatible. I'd love to hear reports of
> anyone who tries it on Rubinius.
>
> I created two other FFI-ish libraries to support the new Rubygame:
> Nice-FFI and Ruby-SDL-FFI. Nice-FFI is a helper library on top of FFI,
> which makes some things in FFI more convenient for me. As one example,
> it can automatically turn pointers returned from a function into
> struct instances of the appropriate class. Ruby-SDL-FFI uses Nice-FFI
> (and plain FFI) to interface with SDL and related libraries. Rubygame
> then uses Ruby-SDL-FFI instead of a compiled extension written in C.
>
> Overall, FFI has been great to work with, and I'm very happy that I
> switched to it! As I mentioned above, I was able to throw away the C
> code and now write everything in Ruby, which is a joy. Not only is it
> easier to write and maintain, it also works on more platforms and is
> much easier for users to install. Before, users had to have a compiler
> environment set up, or hope someone would create a binary gem for
> their OS, which was a huge barrier for Windows users.
>
> Plus, I can now do run-time detection of what libraries and features
> are available on the user's system, and even theoretically provide
> alternative back ends using different libraries. For example, I'm
> considering adding an OpenGL back end (using ffi-opengl, of course!),
> to provide faster rendering and better Mac support. Such a thing would
> have been much more difficult using a C extension, because the feature
> detection there is (usually) done at compile time, which is unreliable
> if compiled on one system and then distributed to others, such as with
> a binary gem.
>
> Anyway, I guess you can count me as a total FFI fanboy now! :-D
>
> Thanks to everyone for your wonderful work on FFI, both for MatzRuby
> and JRuby! It has made my programming life a lot easier, and easier
> for Rubygame users as well.
>
> - John