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.