AgRuby

About Ruby:

• [Homepage] of the Ruby language
• [Online book] on Ruby by the Pragmatic Programmers

Useful bindings:

• [FLTK bindings] makes GUIs a snap on the Agenda!
• [Expat bindings] for parsing XML
• [Berkeley DB bindings] to access the standard applications datafiles.

Binaries:

• [SVR4 binary ] by Vanya Sergeev
• [AgToys] - SNOW [binaries], experimental rootdisk

Compiling efforts, see AgRuby/Compiling.

Problems:

• If anyone gets dynamic loading of extensions to work, please put up the instructions here.
• Memory:
  • Ruby scripts can be quite memory hungry, due to garbage collection. Don't run multiple instances of the Ruby intepreter at once. Avoid running too many programs simultaneously when running Ruby, and you shouldn't have much problems.
  • An SDRAM kernel leaves less memory for applications, and is probably a bad idea if you're planning to run big Ruby scripts. (But then the PMON-update-potential-brick thing probably has you scared anyway ;-)
  • Running Ruby XIP helps avoid "hanging" the unit when memory gets low, but some speed is sacrificed.

Suggestions / ideas / work in progress:

• Agenda-specific extensions:
  • FLPDA - making Ruby apps look native
  • FLTK - changing file_chooser and other methods with variants that don't look like crap on the Agenda
• package - get Ruby binary with library, etc. wrapped up in a package (such as .vrp) to be easily added to other romdisks with romdisk creation tools
• get the readline extension up and running. This should make irb much more usable.