RubyInline

Description

RubyInline was a quick hack that I wrote in response to a group member saying "Ingy did his first version [of Perl's Inline.PM] overnight... it can't be that hard!" In fact, it wasn't, for the first version at least. Since then we've extended it so you can do C++ as well as C, to automatically translate base types to/from ruby and C, and more.

RubyInline comes as a gem which you can install by running:

sudo gem install RubyInline

For your convenience here is the RubyInline README.txt.

Example

In, 3.x, RubyInline has the ability to do any language, although I don't support anything but C/C++ out of the box. Here is a basic example of what RubyInline can do:

class MyTest

  def factorial(n)
    f = 1
    n.downto(2) { |x| f *= x }
    f
  end

  inline do |builder|
    builder.c "
    long factorial_c(int max) {
      int i=max, result=1;
      while (i >= 2) { result *= i--; }
      return result;
    }"
  end
end

The time for 1 million iterations of factorial and factorial_c is 27 and 7 respectively on my PowerBook (you can run 'make bench' from a RubyInline tarball on your hardware to get numbers for your platform).

The only thing this demo doesn't show is the argument to the inline method which defaults to :C. If you passed in a different language name (as a Symbol), you'd load and use a different builder.

RubyInline and RubyToC

I've made advances to ruby2c on RubyForge that allow me to write 13 lines of code to create Inline::Ruby. Behold:

module Inline
  class Ruby < Inline::C
    def initialize(mod)
      super
    end

    def optimize(meth)
      src = RubyToC.translate(@mod, meth)
      @mod.class_eval "alias :#{meth}_slow :#{meth}"
      @mod.class_eval "remove_method :#{meth}"
      c src
    end
  end
end

This allows me to do:

require 'inline'
class MyTest

  def factorial(n)
    f = 1
    n.downto(2) { |x| f *= x }
    f
  end

  inline(:Ruby) do |builder|
    builder.optimize :factorial
  end
end

And it just works.

Subpages:

RubyInline: Readme