The future of our C native extensions

[Jerry D'Antonio]

Over the past several months we've discussed C native extensions with concurrent-ruby. Release 0.7.0 is the first release which had the native code and it had mixed results. In most cases the gem did exactly as intended: installed pre-compiled C extensions on many platforms while installing only pure-Ruby code on platforms without the necessary build tools. (many gems with C extensions simply fail to install when the proper build tools are not available.) This lead to several discussion regarding alternative approaches (https://github.com/ruby-concurrency/concurrent-ruby/issues/186).

I've created a PR (https://github.com/ruby-concurrency/concurrent-ruby/pull/197) which should address this issue in the next major release along with a companion gem (https://github.com/ruby-concurrency/concurrent-ruby-ext) for the native C code that would compile on any platform with the necessary build tools (such as Heroku).

Anyone interested in participating in the discussion is invited to provide feedback on PR #197 (https://github.com/ruby-concurrency/concurrent-ruby/pull/197)

Thank you!

Best regards,

Jerry