Ruby gem native extension with Crystal?

Question

I'm just trying to gather some general information, as I'm looking to improve performance of ActiveModelSerializers.

I've also never written a native extension before, but have looked at some C extensions and Rust extensions.

My Questions:

• Has this been done? (writing a crystal native extension in a ruby gem?)
• How does interacting with ruby objects / structures work in crystal? (Does there need to be any sort of marshalling or anything for communication between the two languages? )

Answer 1

This question has been maybe asked a million times now. You can try to do it, but remember that Crystal has a GC, so it really doesn't make much sense to write native extensions in Crystal. Use C or Rust, which don't have a GC.

Answer 2

Since the Ruby API is written in C, it should be possible to create Crystal bindings for it, then write Ruby extensions in Crystal.

Have a look to the crystalyzed_ruby project for example: https://github.com/phoffer/crystalized_ruby