Rice: Ruby Interface for C++ Extensions
========================================

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's New?

  * Fully compatible with Ruby 1.9.2
  * Constructor now supports default arguments
  * Ability to define implicit casting rules through define_implicit_cast
  * Various tweaks, bug fixes, and memory management updates

Supported Platforms:

  * Linux
  * Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6

  * While Windows has been known to work with MinGW / MSYS, I haven't
    been able to keep this testing up as of late. Would appreciate any help
    here.


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://github.com/jameskilton/rice

  Mailing List: rice / librelist.com
                First email will be used as subscription and dropped.


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>
  #include <rice/Constructor.hpp>

  class MyWrapper {
    public:
      MyWrapper() { }

      void doThis() { }
      int doThat(int a, float b) { }
  };

  extern "C"
  void Init_wrapper()
  {
    define_class<MyWrapper>("MyWrapper")
      .define_constructor(Constructor<MyWrapper>())
      .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)