Ok John, thanks for the clarification. It seems like the extra calls
ought to be something you could do from FFI, but perhaps that's too
late or too complicated?

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 1:10 AM, John Croisant <jacius@gmail.com> wrote:

> RSDL is essentially a wrapper around the Ruby interpreter, but it
> performs some SDL initialization magic that is only necessary on Mac.
> It has something to do with priming Cocoa to open a display window,
> but the details are somewhat arcane, and the implementation is rather
> messy. Without RSDL -- that is, using the plain Ruby (or JRuby)
> interpreter -- Rubygame and Ruby/SDL applications just print a bunch
> of gibberish to the console instead of opening a display window.
>
> Due to the messy and obscure implementation hidden inside SDL, I'm not
> sure there's any way around it except to create a Java program that
> initializes SDL and then runs an embedded JRuby interpreter. It *may*
> be possible to initiate some of the Cocoa stuff that SDL wants via FFI
> or other means, but the mish-mash of C (SDL), Objective-C (Cocoa),
> Java, and Ruby makes my head spin just thinking about it. A Java app
> wrapper would probably be simpler -- although more inconvenient for
> users, because it's one more thing to install, and it's annoying to
> have to remember to use it instead of the usual Ruby interpreter.
>
> I think (or at least hope) that this annoying issue will be solved in
> SDL 1.3, but I have no clue when that will be released. It has been
> "almost ready" several times over the past 2-3 years, but it has never
> managed to get off the ground. I could possibly set up a binding to
> the SDL 1.3 SVN version, but I'm generally not in the habit of using
> unreleased software as dependencies.
>
> My own feeling is that the best, simplest, cleanest course right now
> is for Rubygame to provide an OpenGL back end, but I'm not sure how
> soon I'll be able to attempt it. If someone with Java knowledge wants
> to try making a JRuby-ish RSDL wrapper, I think that would also have a
> good chance of letting Rubygame work on Mac JRuby in the meantime.
>
> - John
>