This first part aims at explaining how Ruby in the background is not Ruby anymore. In the next part I’m going to talk about HOW to bridge some existing C library with your ruby application.

As you might know already, the official ruby interpreter is written in pure C. This means that whenever you type a ruby instruction, the interpreter will call the corresponding C function for you. For example, if you do :

1. arr = Array.new

When you see C using VALUE, what you are really seeing is ruby from the inside, and ruby from the inside is an ugly beast. It is not pretty, not elegant, not easy, not cool and honestly not that interesting. The thing is, it can save you a lot of work if you want to bridge an existing C library into your ruby application instead of having to rewrite the whole thing in plain ruby. That, in part, is why it can be very useful to know a little bit of ruby’s ugly side.