On 11/11/2009 10:49 AM, Wayne Meissner wrote:

2009/11/11 Bryan Kearney<bkearney@redhat.com>:

This could all be implemented in a third-party gem, e.g. NiceFFI,
which would be preferable to putting it in ruby-ffi itself, since that
way it can evolve faster, and be used across both CRuby and JRuby.

I dont know the packaging issues for you reference, but I would really like
to see it combined. If the packaging makes that not possible, at least
document the two together.

There are a couple of points:
1) ruby-ffi releases are timed to coincide with JRuby releases, to
keep the FFI apis in sync.  This means it takes on average 3 months
from one 0.x.0 release to the next, which can seem like an eternity to
someone waiting for a feature.

2) The more stuff added to the core api, the more other
implementations have to implement.


Putting these extras in NiceFFI or another gem allows the features to
iterate a lot quicker, since they no longer impose any api
compatibility constraints - its all pure ruby that runs on any FFI
implementation.

Makes sense. As long as there a documented in one place, then I am fine with it. I would hate to learn the one model and then get a "Hey Dufus, use NiceFFI"

-- bk