RES: Bare-bones Ruby

ruby-talk
1

After you build ruby you can use just a ruby executable without the
standard library if you do not need the functionality it provides. As
for built-in classes and modules, such as String, you will not be able
to get without them as they are implemented internally in C and other
parts of Ruby depend on them heavily.

Dependencies are dependencies!

The book I mentioned has a very good chapter on embedding Ruby.

Will get a copy if I choose Ruby.

3) What are the functions that must be called to make Ruby load a
program,
to create an instance of a class defined in Ruby, to call methods with
this
instance etc.? Is this API documented somewhere?

I did not quite get the question, but if you mean the API between Ruby
and extensions written in C, Pickaxe discusses it in great details too.

Actually I was referring to the API the other way around, from the C host
program to Ruby. I need functions to:

1) Initialize Ruby
2) Register some native functions written in C
3) Run some predefined scripts to register classes
4) Instantiate objects and call their methods
5) go to 4 while the application is running
6) De-initialize Ruby

Regards,

Andre de Leiradella

2

Andre,

There are a number of tutorials about for extending and embedding Ruby,
but you might try taking a look at the slides I wrote for a
presentation I gave to our local Perl Mongers meeting earlier this
year:

http://rcoder.net/talks/pm_sep04/c_api/index.html

It covers just the basics of writing C extensions, as well as
initializing and running the Ruby intepreter from within your own
application. You should be able to get an idea of how much work is
required (not much!) for basic integration.

Lennon
rcoder.net