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Gems with Extensions
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Creating a gem that includes an extension that is built at install time.

Many gems use extensions to wrap libraries that are written in C with a ruby wrapper. Examples include nokogiri which wraps libxml2 and libxslt, pg which is an interface to the PostgreSQL database and the mysql and mysql2 gems which provide an interface to the MySQL database.

Creating a gem that uses an extension involves several steps. This guide will focus on what you should put in your gem specification to make this as easy and maintainable as possible. The extension in this guide will wrap malloc() and free() from the C standard library.

Gem layout

Every gem should start with a Rakefile which contains the tasks needed by developers to work on the gem. The files for the extension should go in the ext/ directory in a directory matching the extension's name. For this example we'll use "my_malloc" for the name.

Some extensions will be partially written in C and partially written in ruby. If you are going to support multiple languages, such as C and Java extensions, you should put the C-specific ruby files under the ext/ directory as well in a lib/ directory.

Rakefile
ext/my_malloc/extconf.rb               # extension configuration
ext/my_malloc/my_malloc.c              # extension source
lib/my_malloc.rb                       # generic features

When the extension is built the files in ext/my_malloc/lib/ will be installed into the lib/ directory for you.

extconf.rb

The extconf.rb configures a Makefile that will build your extension based. The extconf.rb must check for the necessary functions, macros and shared libraries your extension depends upon. The extconf.rb must exit with an error if any of these are missing.

Here is an extconf.rb that checks for malloc() and free() and creates a Makefile that will install the built extension at lib/my_malloc/my_malloc.so:

require "mkmf"

abort "missing malloc()" unless have_func "malloc"
abort "missing free()"   unless have_func "free"

create_makefile "my_malloc/my_malloc"

See the mkmf documentation and README.EXT for further information about creating an extconf.rb and for documentation on these methods.

C Extension

The C extension that wraps malloc() and free() goes in ext/my_malloc/my_malloc.c. Here's the listing:

#include <ruby.h>

struct my_malloc {

size_t size; void *ptr; };

static void
my_malloc_free(void *p) {

struct my_malloc *ptr = p;

if (ptr->size > 0) free(ptr->ptr); }

static VALUE
my_malloc_alloc(VALUE klass) {

VALUE obj; struct my_malloc *ptr;

obj = Data_Make_Struct(klass, struct my_malloc, NULL, my_malloc_free, ptr);

ptr->size = 0; ptr->ptr = NULL;

return obj; }

static VALUE
my_malloc_init(VALUE self, VALUE size) {

struct my_malloc *ptr; size_t requested = NUM2SIZET(size);

if (0 == requested) rb_raise(rb_eArgError, "unable to allocate 0 bytes");

Data_Get_Struct(self, struct my_malloc, ptr);

ptr->ptr = malloc(requested);

if (NULL == ptr->ptr) rb_raise(rb_eNoMemError, "unable to allocate %ld bytes", requested);

ptr->size = requested;

return self; }

static VALUE
my_malloc_release(VALUE self) {

struct my_malloc *ptr;

Data_Get_Struct(self, struct my_malloc, ptr);

if (0 == ptr->size) return self;

ptr->size = 0; free(ptr->ptr);

return self; }

void
Init_my_malloc(void) {

VALUE cMyMalloc;

cMyMalloc = rb_const_get(rb_cObject, rb_intern("MyMalloc"));

rb_define_alloc_func(cMyMalloc, my_malloc_alloc); rb_define_method(cMyMalloc, "initialize", my_malloc_init, 1); rb_define_method(cMyMalloc, "free", my_malloc_release, 0); }

This extension is simple with just a few parts:

  • struct my_malloc to hold the allocated memory
  • my_malloc_free() to free the allocated memory after garbage collection
  • my_malloc_alloc() to create the ruby wrapper object
  • my_malloc_init() to allocate memory from ruby
  • my_malloc_release() to free memory from ruby
  • Init_my_malloc() to register the functions in the MyMalloc class.

You can test building the extension as follows:

$ cd ext/my_malloc
$ ruby extconf.rb
checking for malloc()... yes
checking for free()... yes
creating Makefile
$ make
compiling my_malloc.c
linking shared-object my_malloc.bundle
$ cd ../..
$ ruby -Ilib:ext -r my_malloc -e "p MyMalloc.new(5).free"
#<MyMalloc:0x007fed838addb0>

But this will get tedious after a while. Let's automate it!

rake-compiler

rake-compiler is a set of rake tasks for automating extension building. rake-compiler can be used with C or Java extensions in the same project (nokogiri uses it this way).

Adding rake-compiler is very simple:

require "rake/extensiontask"

Rake::ExtensionTask.new "my_malloc" do |ext|
  ext.lib_dir = "lib/my_malloc"
end

Now you can build the extension with rake compile and hook the compile task into other tasks (such as tests).

Setting lib_dir places the shared library in lib/my_malloc/my_malloc.so (or .bundle or .dll). This allows the top-level file for the gem to be a ruby file. This allows you to write the parts that are best suited to ruby in ruby.

For example:

class MyMalloc

  VERSION = "1.0"

end

require "my_malloc/my_malloc"

Setting the lib_dir also allows you to build a gem that contains pre-built extensions for multiple versions of ruby. (An extension for Ruby 1.9.3 cannot be used with an extension for Ruby 2.0.0). lib/my_malloc.rb can pick the correct shared library to install.

Gem specification

The final step to building the gem is adding the extconf.rb to the extensions list in the gemspec:

Gem::Specification.new "my_malloc", "1.0" do |s|
  # [...]

  s.extensions = %w[ext/my_malloc/extconf.rb]
end

Now you can build and release the gem!

Extension Naming

To avoid unintended interactions between gems, it's a good idea for each gem to keep all of its files in a single directory. Here are the recommendations for a gem with the name <name>:

  1. ext/<name> is the directory that contains the source files and extconf.rb
  2. ext/<name>/<name>.c is the main source file (there may be others)
  3. ext/<name>/<name>.c contains a function Init_<name>. (The name following Init_ function must exactly match the name of the extension for it to be loadable by require.)
  4. ext/<name>/extconf.rb calls create_makefile('<name>/<name>') only when the all the pieces needed to compile the extension are present.
  5. The gemspec sets extensions = ['ext/<name>/extconf.rb'] and includes any of the necessary extension source files in the files list.
  6. lib/<name>.rb contains require '<name>/<name>' which loads the C extension

Further Reading

  • my_malloc contains the source for this extension with some additional comments.
  • README.EXT describes in greater detail how to build extensions in ruby
  • MakeMakefile contains documentation for mkmf.rb, the library extconf.rb uses to detect ruby and C library features
  • rake-compiler integrates building C and Java extensions into your Rakefile in a smooth manner.
  • Writing C extensions part 1 and part 2) by Aaron Patterson
  • Interfaces to C libraries can be written using ruby and fiddle (part of the standard library) or ruby-ffi