The State of C Extensions: Alive and Well, so Learn to Deal
summary
C extensions remain common and practical: only about 45 of 21,000 gems are native but 18 of the top 100 downloads are C extensions, and real-world libraries like zlib and JSON mix C for speed and compatibility. Examples show big wins — replacing Ruby PNG decoding with a C patch yields 80× faster decoding — and tooling makes builds workable: RubyInstaller + DevKit on Windows, trivial gcc builds on Linux/OSX, and recent work in Rubinius/JRuby/MacRuby improves interpreter portability so C extensions compile and run across major Ruby VMs.
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