IronRuby Unleashed

Chapter 19. Extending IronRuby

In This Chapter

• Creating an Extension

• Using an Extension

• Building an Extension from Scratch

Iron Ruby provides amazing interoperability between Ruby and CLR objects. As a result, you can seamlessly use every .NET class inside IronRuby code. However, there are times when you want to write code in a static language that will act as a native Ruby object from within IronRuby code.

This is not a new idea. Ruby itself provides a way to write extensions in C: native extensions.

There are several reasons for that. The first reason might be to handle Win32 API calls. IronRuby can’t call the Win32 API like C# or VB.Net do with DllImport. To solve this issue, you can either write a regular .NET assembly ...