Background and Concepts

World's Simplest Rust Extension

To illustrate how native extensions work, we are going to create the simplest possible native extension for Ruby. This is only to shows the core concepts of how native extensions work under the hood.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
// simplest_rust_extenion.rs

// Define the libruby functions we need so we can use them (in a real gem, rb-sys would do this for you)
extern "C" {
    fn rb_define_global_function(name: *const u8, func: extern "C" fn() -> usize, arity: isize);
    fn rb_str_new(ptr: *const u8, len: isize) -> usize;
}

extern "C" fn hello_from_rust() -> usize {
    unsafe { rb_str_new("Hello, world!".as_ptr(), 12) }
}

// Initialize the extension
#[no_mangle]
unsafe extern "C" fn Init_simplest_rust_extension() {
    rb_define_global_function("hello_from_rust\0".as_ptr(), hello_from_rust, 0);
}
}

Then, its a matter of compiling and running like so:

$ rustc --crate-type=cdylib simplest_rust_extension.rs -o simplest_rust_extension.bundle -C link-arg="-Wl,-undefined,dynamic_lookup"

$ ruby -r ./simplest_rust_extension -e "puts hello_from_rust" #=> "Hello, world!"

What is a native extension?

Typically, Ruby code is compiled to a special instruction set which executes on a stack-based virtual machine. You can see what these instructions look like by running:

$ ruby --dump=insns -e '2 + 3'
== disasm: #<ISeq:<main>@-e:1 (1,0)-(1,5)> (catch: FALSE)
0000 putobject         2           (   1)[Li]
0002 putobject         3
0004 opt_plus          <calldata!mid:+, argc:1, ARGS_SIMPLE>[CcCr]
0006 leave

In this example, 2 and 3 are pushed onto the stack, and then opt_plus performs the addition.

For a native gem, we bypass this mechanism entirely and instead exposes native machine code to Ruby. In our native code, we can use the Ruby C API to interact with the Ruby VM.

How are native Gems loaded?

Under the hood, native extensions are compiled as shared libraries (.so, .bundle, etc.). When you require 'some_gem', if Ruby finds a some_gem.(so|bundle|lib), the shared library loaded on demand using dlopen (or the system equivalent). After that, Ruby will call Init_some_gem so the native library can do its magic.

Why does it work with Rust and not other languages?

C is often referred to as the "lingua franca" of the programming language world, and Rust is fluent. Rust can compile functions to be compatible with the C calling conventions, and align items in memory in a way that C understands. Rust also does not have a garbage collector, which makes integration signifcantly easier.

When Ruby loads a gem extension written in Rust, it has no idea the gem is actually written in Rust. Due to Rust's robust C FFI, you can code anything in Rust that you could with C.