Scripting languages are popular today because of it’s reasonable learning curve and speed of development. But there are programming problems where scripting languages can not be used. Examples include talking directly to specific OS system calls not exposed to the scripting language (like raw sockets on Linux), or communicating with peripheral hardware devices. Such system interfaces are often written in C. But how do we use them from scripting languages? We can write interfaces from scripting languages like Ruby or Lua to C libraries. In this session, we will look at writing interfaces from Lua to C library. We will also look at writing code from Ruby on Rails to use C library. You will not need to be experts of either language but some programming experience is presumed.
A survey of mechanisms available to call native libraries or system level code from higher level application.