(Experimental) Ruby Rope extension written in C

These codes are written as a part of Google Summer of Code 2016.

Automatic-selection mechanism for data structures in MRI

Prototypes of Rope data structure for String class of Ruby.

Short Explanation

• I implemented concatenation, substring, indexing operations and iterator over string as a data structure in C. (in src/)
• Memory management are done by reference count, and hence good performance is not obtained without memory leak by stopping reference count.
• After that, I wrapped it as an extension of Ruby String object which have methods such as eql, +, concat, length, size, [], delete_at, slice, at, to_s, to_str, inspect, dump. (in ext/rope, especially rb_rope.c is implementation of Rope class)
• Wrapped as Data class in Ruby (Details about Ruby extension: http://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/2.3.0/extension_rdoc.html)
• Finally, I wrote Ruby class ERope(Elastic Rope) for an evaluation of prototyping and dynamic-selection of data structure. ERope class is just a thin wrapper of Ruby string class and Rope class written above, and it can concatenate string as a rope. (in ext/erope, codes here are only for an experiment and not mature at all)

Build

(It may be needed to fix Rakefile, e.g. CC=clang)

rake