In JRuby 1.6, we added support for Ruby's C API, allowing C-based extensions to build and run on JRuby.

Released

JRuby 1.6.0 RC1 released prebuilt support for C extensions on OS X. The final release will include prebuilt support for Linux and Windows as well.

Building

If you need C extension support on a platform for which we do not have prebuilt binaries, you'll want to grab and build JRuby yourself.

Prerequisites

• Java 1.5 or higher
• Ant 1.7 or higher
• Appropriate build tools (make, gcc)
  • On Windows, you'll want the mingw32 tools available in PATH

Steps for building

1. Grab and unpack the src dist from JRuby.org downloads (Note: RC1's src tarball did did not have the "cext" dir included. Download a tarball from github)
2. Run 'ant cext' from the unpacked directory

Ant should build JRuby as normal and then call "make" to build the C extension support.

Troubleshooting

Please post issues to the JRuby mailing lists, including whether extensions you use are working or not working.