Re: [Rubydotnet-developer] Introduction

[Thomas S. <th...@th...>]

Hi Tim

Thanks for getting in contact. So both you and Ben have something that mostly 
works - Excellent. There is a number of other people who are interested in 
working on getting ruby/.net integration to work. Would you be interested in 
collaborating with us? I think, if you and Ben, are willing a good next step 
would be to get your code out in the public, so more people can start 
contributing.

Cheers,

Thomas

---------- Original Message -----------
From: Tim Sutherland <ti...@ih...>
To: rub...@so...
Sent: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 10:47:23 +1200
Subject: [Rubydotnet-developer] Introduction

> A few days ago I posted a message to rubytalk mentioning a library I 
> am working on for allowing Ruby and DotNet to call each others' methods
> 
> (http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/75198)
> 
> Since then I've been contacted by Ben Schroeder who told me about the
> similar project he has been working on, and who told me about this list.
> 
> Status of my library: It mostly works, need to do more testing /
> documentation. (Well, write *any* documentation!) Ben's project has 
> a richer interface e.g. uses Enumerable methods whenever a DotNet 
> object supports Count (or Length) and get_Item. There are other 
> things I'd like to implement like a "dotnet_methods" methods.
> 
> I'll try to make a release soon under a BSD-ish license.
> 
> My interface (calling DotNet methods from Ruby) looks like:
> 	# It would be nicer if this was
> 	#  DotNet::System::Collections::Hashtable.
> 	hash_class = DotNet::Class.new('System.Collections.Hashtable')
> 
> 	h = hash_class.new # h is an instance of DotNet::Instance 
> 	h['a'] = [1, 2, 'three']
> 	
> 	p(h['a']) # -> "[1, 2, \"three\"]"
> 	p(h.Count) # -> 1
> 
> 	# DotNet.new can be used just for type conversions.
> 	five = DotNet.new(5) # five is an instance of DotNet::Instance
> 	p(five.to_rb == 5) # -> true
> 
> Type conversions: Integers, strings, arrays, nil, true, false are
> automatically converted to DotNet types. Calling 'to_rb' on a
> DotNet::Instance instance converts it to the Ruby type, if the object
> was one of the previously listed types.
> 
> All operators/indexers are implemented (I believe). For relational
> operators (==, eql?, <, <=, >=, > ) we force the returned value to
> be a Ruby boolean. (Theoretically a DotNet library could implement 
> '<' as returning e.g. an integer.) <=> is implemented using "== and 
> <". == is implemented using Equals not op_Equality since e.g. 
> System.Int32 only defines the former.
> 
> I also implement "hash" in terms of "GetHash".
> 
> When calling DotNet methods, if the method name ends in '=', we chop 
> off the '=' and treat it as a SetField|SetProperty. Otherwise we use 
> InvokeMethod|GetField|GetProperty. (My library uses 
> GetType#InvokeMember.)
> 
> At the moment I don't have any way to use DotNet delegates from the Ruby
> side.
> 
> DotNet exceptions are mapped to DotNet::Exception Ruby exceptions, where
> 'message' is the same as the DotNet 'Message', and the 'dotnet_exception'
> attr_reader provides the original DotNet exception.
> 
> >From the DotNet (e.g. C#) side, I can do things like
> 	RbType a = RbType.Eval('[1, 2, 3]');
> 	int size = a.Call("size").ToInteger();
> 
> There are (implicit operator) conversions for integers, strings, 
> arrays, null, true, false.
> 
> You can use a delegate to represent a Ruby block, although I haven't
> tested this. I've implemented most operators in the usual way, although
> I forgot to do indexers -> [] and []=.
> 
> Ruby exceptions are mapped into DotNet RbException types.
> 
> Implementation wise, the code for calling Ruby from DotNet and 
> calling DotNet from Ruby are mostly separate. They each use 
> reference counting, which has the known problems e.g. circular references.
> 
> The code is implemented in C# and C (Ruby extension.) There are 
> about 8 lines of Microsoft's Extended C++ to allow for initialisation.
> 
> The code does not run on Mono yet (http://www.go-mono.com/) because 
> of a couple of bugs in that implementation. I intend to support this 
> on both Microsoft and Mono implementations of dotnet.
> 
> I'd be interested in seeing what other people have developed so we 
> can share ideas/code.
> 
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------- End of Original Message -------