ruby-xcb by crapooze

== DESCRIPTION:

Ruby-XCB wants to be a Ruby binding to the XCB library. It is currently an experimental project more than anything else.

== REQUIREMENTS:

• gcc
• xcb with headers files (maybe devel package)
• a ruby implementation which can run the other dependencies
• ffi
• rbgccxml
• gccxml_gem
• nokogiri (it's in fact a dependency on rbgccxml)

== HOW IT WORKS:

Since XCB code is really nice and modular, it is easy to automatically build a ruby/ffi wrapper around it.

The binding is built following these steps:

• first rbgccxml and gccxml_gem compiles the .h files to a big XML description
• then ruby-xcb builds structures, unions, and methods given the XML desscription
• some const_missing or method_missing magic makes the use of the library easier
• I "manually" added some constants defined with preprocessor #define statements, I'll later autogenerate this

Currently, the wrapper is rebuilt each time but it could be easy to "compile" the wrapper once to ruby code and then distribute it directly.

See also the NOTES file for random remarks.

== DISCLAIMER:

I'm not an expert with FFI yet (nor with XCB at all), it is thus very likely that there are memory leaks.