Beyond Ruby

Ruby is the shining star in a few other domains besides game graphics and game engines. A few of these are listed in the following sections.

The Snack Sound Toolkit for Ruby

The Snack Sound Toolkit is a collection of sound- and voice-processing routines and includes tools for speech recognition, formant tracking and synthesis, and other fun sound-and speech-based tools. The toolkit, written by Stephen Legrand, is used to extend scripting languages and enable such tools within them; Ruby is its prodigy pilot-child.

The original implementation of Snack was inspired by Kåre Sjölander and was extended to Tcl/Tk. Snack for Ruby leverages the existing Tk graphics and provides direct support for waveforms and spectrograms.

Snack for Ruby requires that the Snack package and Tcl/Tk be installed. RPMs that combine both Snack and Tcl/TK in one install are available for linux users, and the toolkit runs on both Posix and Windows environments.

Snack for Ruby is still under development but was presented at the International Ruby Conference.

The toolkit can be found on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/rbsnack/.

rbwrap

rbwrap is a tool for converting Ruby scripts and programs into standalone executables. The tool is in alpha currently but works for Windows systems. The package relies on Cygwin and the gnu c Compiler.

rbwrap is written by Robert Feldt and can be found at the author's Website, at http://www.ce.chalmers.se/~feldt/ruby/applications/rbwrap.

Memeoize

Memeoize is a tool for speeding up program execution. It does so by caching functions, increasing the size of the running program but also speeding up execution time. Memoize is also the brainchild of Robert Feldt; it relies on Cygwin and is meant to work with Ruby 1.6.2.

Memeoize is available online at http://www.ce.chalmers.se/~feldt/ruby/extensions/memeoize.

[ LiB ]