For a very long time the only way to extend Ruby with native estensions has been using C.
I don’t have the numbers with me, but I guess C is not the first choice for Ruby programmers when they have to pick up a secondary/complentary language.
So I started investigating the possibility of writing them in other languages, taking advantage of the favorable moment: in the past 3-4 years we had an explosion of new languages that compile down to native code and can be easily used to produce a C equivalent shared library that Ruby can pick up and load.
My main goal was to find languages that a Ruby programmer would understand effortlessly or with a minimum investment.
This first episode will focus on Go.
Continue reading “Writing Ruby extensions in Go – an in depth review”