Ruby and Rails run faster everyday, but we still encounter situations where we need more performance than we can get from today's Ruby VM. Integrating C with Ruby code is a great way to obliterate performance bottlenecks.

You'll leave this session with a good understanding of how to use two technologies to integrate Ruby and C. We'll use the RubyInline as well as create a C extension, and we'll use both from Rails to show how a small amount of C code can make your Rails application sing. Here's a short outline of some of the topics covered:

Why should I use C?

• to access legacy libraries
• to improve performance

How can I use C?

• RubyInline (http://www.zenspider.com/ZSS/Products/RubyInline/)
• C Extensions (http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ext_ruby.html; http://www.jaredrichardson.net/blog/2006/03/25/)

Show me

• We'll take a pre-written Rails app that does a decent amount of server side computation (~10 to 30 seconds)
• First we'll use RubyInline to show the simple case
• Second we'll demonstrate a complete C extension

I don't plan on covering profiling tools that would expose these bottlenecks, but will provide some pointers to resources.