Prior Art

This page lists related projects and adjacent tools that influenced, overlap with, or can complement ruby-bindgen.

C/C++

SWIG

• Project: SWIG
• Scope: Multi-language binding generator for C and C++
• Notes: Generates bindings for many languages including Ruby, Python, Java, and Go. Uses its own interface definition files rather than parsing headers directly. The most established tool in this space — active since 1996.

ffi_gen

• Project: ffi_gen
• Scope: Generate Ruby FFI wrappers for C APIs
• Notes: Has not been updated in over a decade and includes liblang findings versus using ffi-clang.

rbind

• Project: rbind
• Scope: C++ binding generator with a custom parser approach
• Notes: Has not been updated in four years and is coupled to OpenCV

Rust

Magnus

• Project: magnus
• Scope: Rust crate for Ruby bindings
• Notes: Not a direct Ruby generator alternative for C/C++, but useful as a design reference for Ruby-native APIs from another language.

rb-sys

• Project: rb-sys
• Scope: Rust bindings for the Ruby C API
• Notes: Provides low-level Rust bindings to Ruby, auto-generated from ruby.h using rust-bindgen.