Rice: Ruby Interface for C++ Extensions
Change Log:
- Works on Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9.0 with no changes to current
extensions - Fixed memory leaks
- Fixed various compilation issues, build uses the system’s ruby
library and doesn’t assume the name of libruby.so - Now properly uses the ruby in --with-ruby for every step of the
compilation process (e.g. can be installed on multiple ruby installs
on a single system) - Removed all uses of known deprecated APIs, like STR2CSTR
- Now builds extensions to allow multiple Rice extensions to be
require’d together
What is Rice?
Rice is a C++ interface to Ruby’s C API. It provides a type-safe and
exception-safe interface in order to make embedding Ruby and writing
Ruby extensions with C++ easier. It is similar to Boost.Python in many
ways, but also attempts to provide an object-oriented interface to all
of the Ruby C API.
What Rice gives you:
- A simple C+±based syntax for wrapping and defining classes
- Automatic conversion of exceptions between C++ and Ruby
- Smart pointers for handling garbage collection
- Wrappers for most builtin types to simplify calling code
Documentation: http://rice.rubyforge.org
Project Page: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rice
How do you get Rice?
gem install rice
Note: Rice does require a C++ compiler. See the Documentation page for
more details.
How simple of a syntax?
wrapper.cpp
#include “rice/Class.hpp”
class MyWrapper {
public:
MyWrapper() { }
void doThis() { }
int doThat(int a, float b) { }
};
extern “C”
void Init_wrapper()
{
define_class(“MyWrapper”)
.define_constructor(Constructor())
.define_method(“do_this”, &MyWrapper::doThis)
.define_method(“do_that”, &MyWrapper::doThat);
}
extconf.rb
require ‘mkmf-rice’
create_makefile(“wrapper”)
test.rb
require ‘wrapper’
c = MyWrapper.new
c.do_this
c.do_that(1, 2.0)
Building Ruby wrapper extensions have never been so easy!