Thomas Hurst wrote:
> * Charles Oliver Nutter (charles.nutter / sun.com) wrote:
> 
>> The JRuby team is proud to announce the release of FFI for Ruby
>> 1.8.6/7 and 1.9!
> 
>> Finally, there's no need to write a C extension to call C libraries,
>> and the same FFI code will work in Ruby 1.8.6/7, Ruby 1.9, JRuby
>> 1.1.4+, and Rubinius (though Rubinius has no callback support yet).
> 
> Awesome.  I've used DL to link up some custom libs to a Ruby service,
> will give FFI a go and see how it compares :)
> 
> Are things like structs likely to be supported in future, ala Python
> ctypes?

Actually structs are already supported! See the blog post, and I believe 
there's some examples shipped with the gem. There needs to be more docs, 
certainly, and hopefully they'll get some TLC soon.

Also, I forgot to call out Evan Phoenix for coming up with the API and 
initial design, and he or someone else on Rubinus wrote up the 
templating/header-file-processing stuff as well. And of course a huge 
thanks to Wayne Meissner for implementing FFI not just once (for JRuby) 
but twice (for C Ruby). His work will mean a huge leap forward in 
cross-impl portability.

- Charlie