This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Laurent Sansonetti. Original Post: Function Pointers in RubyCocoa Feed Title: lrz's diary Feed URL: http://www.chopine.be/lrz/diary/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: lrz's diary Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Laurent Sansonetti Latest Posts From lrz's diary

Very recently I committed some early support for C function pointers arguments to RubyCocoa.

  $ irb -r osx/foundation
   >> include OSX
  => Object
   >> ary = NSMutableArray.alloc.init
  => #
   >> [5, 3, 2, 4, 1].each { |i| ary.addObject(i) }
  => [5, 3, 2, 4, 1]
   >> ary.sortUsingFunction_context(proc { |x, y, ctx| x.intValue <=>  
  y.intValue }, nil)
  => nil
   >> ary.to_a.map { |x| x.to_i }
  => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

How does it work? gen_bridge_metadata.rb has been modified to detect function-pointer arguments and return value in C functions and Objective-C methods, and provide some additional XML markup. RubyCocoa at runtime detects the markup and will convert Ruby Proc objects into function pointers, by creating intermediate Libffi closures.

RubyCocoa is getting very powerful, it looks like a C bridge now :-)