Ruby Go shared library connections

With the release of Go 1.5, it is possible to make a go library for third-party programs in other languages. That is, you can write a package that does something interesting and hard or just a ready-made solution and connect it to another non-Go program. This may be C, android, objective C and etc. I will show how it can be easily connected to Ruby.



1. If you have a ready-made solution for a go problem, then why not write it again in Ruby;

2. Go is obviously faster than Ruby if we are talking about our logic and not ready-made solutions with gem in which C often works;

3. Go requires less memory if you need to work with a bunch of data.



Let's start with the Go package.



We write our fast good working solutions on Go:



This should contain main. Be sure to specify:

 import "C" 

And for the function that will be available from the outside, you must specify:

 //export % % 

Now that the GO program is ready, you need to build it:

 go build -buildmode=c-shared -o libadd.so testruby.go 

-buildmode is what appeared on Go 1.5, there are several different options, we need c-shared. After compilation we get .so and .h file. Now it can be switched to non-GO programs.

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Now part of ruby.



We need gem ffi . We install it via gem install or via gemfile + bundle install. We connect our library to Ruby:



Here we indicate where our .so file is, what call functions it has (on which we wrote "// export"), what they accept and what they return (you can see the full list of types here ). After that you can work:



The first call will be a little slow (probably loads everything into memory).



Benchmarks!

 [21] pry(main)> Benchmark.realtime { (1..1000).to_a.each {GoHello.add_ruby(3,2) }} => 1.763254 [22] pry(main)> Benchmark.realtime { (1..1000).to_a.each {GoHello.add_go(3,2) }} => 0.030442 [23] pry(main)> Benchmark.realtime { (1..100000).to_a.each {GoHello.add_go(3,2) }} => 3.103797 [24] pry(main)> Benchmark.realtime { (1..100000).to_a.each {GoHello.add_ruby(3,2) }} => 195.282368 

As you can see, in simple arithmetic, Go overtakes Ruby by 60 times.



Minuses:

1. I'm not sure that you can build a bunch of Gorutin in Go. It worked for me on a small check (not thousands of gorutin);



P.C .: There is a similar solution for Python here .