When writing extensions for Ruby in C or C++, there are 9 common problems
that are often left unaddressed.  These issues include security,
exception safety, thread safety, GC safety, unit testing, inheritance,
callbacks, data serialization, and conversion of the API to the "Ruby
Way." Many of these are nontrivial problems, but can often be addressed
by following some prescribed patterns/idioms.  A short introduction to
writing C extensions will be given, after which each of these issues
will be briefly discussed.  A few solutions will be posed to some of the
problems.  The mechanism used by SWIG to deal with some of these issues
will also be touched on, along with a demo of how to use SWIG in an
extension.  A demo will also be given of the Rice (Ruby Interface for
C++ Extensions) library, parts of which are currently in use in
production applications.