Looking for more information on rubifying C# classes

Ruby IronRuby
1

Hello IronRubyists,

I’m currently hunting around trying to find references on rubifying a C#
class for something I’m writing.

I have a few questions:

  • Can you confirm this summary of the process to be correct (am I
    missing any steps):
    The generate class intialiser exe parses the attributes out and
    generates the initializer file. Then you recompile the library with the
    added initializer class included.
    When using load_assembly you pass in the name of the initializer class
    name as the second parameter.
    Under the covers that initializer tells IronRuby how to create the
    ruby API.

  • Is there any documentation for the Ruby* attributes? (RubyMethod,
    RubyConstant, etc)
    I can easily guess at what these are/do, but I just wanted to know if
    there is a definitive source.

  • What are the differences between require and load_assembly (besides
    load_assembly loading the file on every call)

Any answers or comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Adam Burmister

2

The steps sound correct.

The attributes are pretty easy to understand if you search for existing
uses. The harder part is how to declare the arguments with annotations
for Ruby semantics.
http://wiki.github.com/ironruby/ironruby/modifying-the-sources has some
info. Please add to it if you can.

Could you provide info about why you need to Rubyify your C# class?
IronRuby already exposes a Rubified view for all .NET classes (for
example, allowing you to use “lower_case” names for methods)? You need
to rubyify your code mainly if you want strict Ruby semantics as is
needed by the builtin library types.

load_assembly is just more explicit. See
http://ironruby.net/Documentation/.NET/Assemblies. load_assembly does
not load the assembly on every call as .NET does not support reloading
an assembly multiple times. Perhaps it should have been called
require_assembly…

3

Also, load_assembly calls the library initializers if called with a
second argument which is the namespace within the assembly to look in
for the attributes (RubyMethod, RubyConstant, etc). See
Merlin\Main\Languages\Ruby\Libs\thread.rb as an example for this usage
of load_library.

4

Tomas has updated http://ironruby.net/Documentation/.NET/Assemblies.
Thanks for the good info, Tomas