Announcing Zliby — All Zlib, Pure Ruby
A few weeks ago Dr. Wayne Kelly posted on the IronRuby mailing list the set of libraries and methods that had to be implemented in order to perform a rubygems setup. This is an important first step towards full rails support. I volunteered to take on the task of porting the Zlib library. I thought, why not implement it in pure Ruby, that way there would be no external dependencies. It would have to be API compatible with the ruby-core Zlib implementation, so it could be used in place of the natively compiled libraries.
After about a week of hacking on it, I’ve decided to make the initial public release of Zliby. Right now the only thing that’s implemented is Zlib::Inflate’s inflate functionality and Zlib::GzipReader’s read functionality. Eventually all of the ruby-core Zlib API will be implemented, and I hope to add other compression support going forward. Before you ask, yes it’s slower then a native implementation, but it’s portable, and has not be optimized for speed in any way yet. Also, since it’s being developed for use in IronRuby, there are a few constructs that I can’t currently use (Array#pack for instance) though I will be able to in the future. Comments, feedback, and suggestions welcome!
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