The Raleigh-area Ruby Brigade May Meeting

Building native extensions. This could take a while.

We all know Ruby has C underpinnings, and we've all seen the native extension message when certain gems are installed, but what does it mean? What's a native extension? Can you build one? Is it hard? And when and why would you want to use one? Aren't they just for "other people"?

Fear not! It's all surprisingly simple. We'll cut straight to the chase, skip the boring slideshow, and together develop some simple C extensions to see how it's done. Afterwards, I'll have a boring slideshow where I share performance results from a recent real world project that utilized C extensions.

All attendees (that want one) will get a free BubbleTimer account, and there will be a drawing for a free copy of my iPhone book.

About the Speaker:

Sean Johnson lives in Chapel Hill where he and his ferret, Pica, run Snooty Monkey and create simple Rails and iPhone software for a complex world. Prior to Snooty Monkey, Sean spent an odd decade or two creating complex software for various startups and for IBM. This was before Sean saw the light on the night his latest and final J2EE creation became sentient and threatened the planet and long before he started writing in the third person. You can see some of Sean's work at http://bubbletimer.co..., http://hexawise.com/... and http://winthetrophy.c....