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Creating Ruby native extensions

Vinicius Stock on April 09, 2019

Note Since the time this post was written, the ext option has been added to bundler, which automatically configures a new gem to be a na...
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Ashwin Vaswani •

Cool! I haven't created a native extension yet but this got me researching other alternatives and I found Helix, looks like it lets you write type safe performant Ruby classes in Rust. What's really interesting is that you can use any arbitrary Rust crate in your code.. Gonna have to find a reason to use this 😄

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Vinicius Stock •

I haven't used Helix before, but it does seem interesting. I know there are other alternatives for writing native exntesions in Crystal and in Java. I wonder if they differ significantly in performance.

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Mikhail Krainik •

As told there usehelix.com/roadmap#performance-p...

Performance parity with C
In general, Rust is in the same performance ballpark as C for code >written in Rust (sometimes it’s even faster). However, the cost of >crossing from Ruby to Rust is still high (compared to Ruby C >extensions).

That being said, because using native code is so much faster than >Ruby, you can recoup the cost difference pretty quickly. This >problem is more important for chatty APIs, or drop-in replacements >for Ruby APIs that intrinsically require a lot of communication with >Ruby (e.g. to_str).

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George Plymale II •

Here is another interesting tutorial about how to write C extensions.