Hello World,

This post is about writing C extensions for Ruby.  There are benefits of writing a C extension for Ruby.

The best place to start is the Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide chapter on Extending Ruby.

A excellent series of more in-depth tutorials were written by Chris Lalancette.

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 1, Project Setup
  

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 2, RDoc

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 3, Extension Initialization

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 4, Types and Return Values

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 5, Exceptions

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 6, Catch/Throw

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 7, Numbers

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 8, Strings

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 9, Arrays

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 10, Hashes

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 11, Blocks and Callbacks

• Writing Ruby Extensions in C – Part 12, Allocating memory

After your C extension is finished, you may want to package your C extension as a rubygem.