I would be more than happy to either help Brian finish his implementation or start working on the FFI version. I would think for the good of the ruby community as a whole having an FFI version would be nice. Does Rubinius have a working win32ole library?
As far as the FFI version goes, I must say that I don't really know where to start. I'm trying to understand what's happening in the Win32API.rb and samples/ffi rb files, but I must say they are pretty cryptic to me. If I've never done C programming before will I be pretty lost? I certainly don't want to ask for so much help that one of you might as well be doing it for me, but if someone could explain more of what's happening in one of these files that might get me a long ways. Also, I was going some googling and I found that someone has been working on a pure ruby version of this library http://github.com/djberg96/pr-win32ole. I tried installing and using it but I had a problem. It looks like a pretty monstrous piece of ruby, but would this be better than FFI or Jacob if it worked? Joe On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Charles Oliver Nutter <head...@headius.com>wrote: > On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Thomas E Enebo <tom.en...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > The main downside of Jacob for me was that it seemed to run incredibly > > slowly in comparison to MRI (from what I remember at least an order of > > magnitude slower). I did implement a simple win32ole shim using JI > > layer (which obviously slows it down more), but it seemed like the > > library must be doing something that MRI's extension isn't on every > > call. Still I suppose something which works is better than nothing at > > all. Who knows, Jacob may have fixed the speed issue since > > then....OR....I was using Jacob wrong? > > I'd say if Brian has a mostly-complete version based on Jacob, we > should try testing it out and see how the performance looks. If it's > no longer a problem, then we have a completed library we could start > providing today. > > Regarding FFI... > > > I still like the idea of an FFI version. It might need to screw with > > 32 + 64 bit bindings for some APIs (maybe?), but it in theory, it > > could become the implementation for MRI and JRuby (assuming it worked > > well and MRI decided not to maintain their 3000 lines of C code -- > > which is true for 1.9 already right?). Since windows is supposed to > > be binary compatible across versions I think that FFI is in a sweet > > spot there, so I don't expect many/any struct binding layout issues. > > This is actually a pretty compelling reason to do it in FFI, even if > it takes longer to do an FFI version. Having all FFI-supporting impls > using the same win32ole code would be outstanding. So perhaps we go > with Brian's "almost done" version for now and those of you interested > in implementing an FFI version should still proceed with your efforts? > > - Charlie > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: > > http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email > > >
