New runtimes, technologies and languages keep popping up, and there is a need for libraries that work across language, and across runtimes.

This talk will contrast some of the ways to build a native (usually C/C++) extension, and integrate them with your application. We'll look at how to build a native extension, while staying within the paradigm of the language.

We will be covering (in some detail): * Native C extensions using MRI/Rbx APIs (and contrasting it with the python API possibly) * SWIG to automatically generate wrapper code * FFI to build libraries that work across multiple implementations of ruby