[ANN] ffi 0.5.0

[Andrea Fazzi]

ffi version 0.5.0
by Wayne Meissner
http://wiki.github.com/ffi/ffi

== DESCRIPTION

Ruby-FFI is a ruby extension for programmatically loading dynamic
libraries, binding functions within them, and calling those functions
from Ruby code. Moreover, a Ruby-FFI extension works without changes
on Ruby and JRuby. Discover why should you write your next extension
using Ruby-FFI here[http://wiki.github.com/ffi/ffi/why-use-ffi].

== CHANGES

* Major improvements
* New Function class
* Structs can be passed and returned by value
* Implement a custom trampoline for x86_64, resulting in roughly 30%
speedup
* Improve dispatch of functions which take (0..6)
char/short/int/long/pointer arguments by between 50% and 200% on x86_64
* Callbacks are now approximately 100% faster on x86_64
* Minor improvements
* Add support for MacOSX Snow Leopard
* Improve support for Windows releasing fat binaries on rubyforge
* Better introspection in structs:
* Add StructLayout::Field#type, size, offset, alignment and name
methods
* Add StructLayout#fields which returns an array of
StructLayout::Field objects
* Add automagic deducing of library name from module name.
Idea and prototype implementation from Matt Hulse
* Callback fields in structs can now be both read and written
* Add a bunch of new benchmarks
* Lots of refactoring
* Experimental features
* blocking functions (i.e. native code that blocks the thread) support
* Bug fixes
* Fix RUBY-FFI_43 (rake gem dependency)

== FEATURES

* It has a very intuitive DSL
* It supports all C native types
* It supports C structs (also nested), enums and global variables
* It supports callbacks
* It has smart methods to handle memory management of pointers and
structs

== SYNOPSIS

require 'ffi'

module MyLib
extend FFI::Library
attach_function uts, [ :string ], :int
end

MyLib.puts 'Hello boys using libc!'

For less minimalistic and more sane examples you may look at:

* the samples/ folder
* the examples on the wiki[http://wiki.github.com/ffi/ffi]
* the projects using FFI listed on this
page[http://wiki.github.com/ffi/ffi/projects-using-ffi]

== REQUIREMENTS

* You need a sane building environment in order to compile the
extension.

== DOWNLOAD/INSTALL

From rubyforge:

[sudo] gem install ffi

or from the git repository on github:

git clone git://github.com/ffi/ffi.git
cd ffi
rake gem:install

== CREDITS

Special thanks to:

* Yehuda Katz
* Luc Heinrich
* Andrea Fazzi
* Mike Dalessio
* Hongli Lai
* Evan Phoenix
* Aman Gupta
* Beoran

== LICENSE

See LICENSE file.