RubyTreasures

Ruby Treasures is a pet project of mine that I think contains a lot of nifty add-ons for Ruby. Some of these may be more useful than others; that's for you to decide.

The latest version is 0.5. It has a few bugfixes, support for Ruby 1.8, and some new features (Object#become, LazyEvaluator, RubyVersion, and performing_action). You may:

• download it
• view the documentation
• view the source
• view the changelog

Old versions are also available:

• RubyTreasures 0.3 / docs / source
  
• RubyTreasures 0.3 / docs / source
  
• RubyTreasures 0.2 / docs / source
  
• RubyTreasures 0.1 / docs / source
  

Note that the data structures that were in version 0.1 are now part of RubyCollections.

The project has just a few goals:

• To implement common utility classes that are missing from the Ruby standard library.
• Miscellaneous useful classes for writing Ruby applications.
• Interesting hacks and tweaks to the interpreter and/or library that may or may not be of use to people.

The primary goal, however, is for me to have fun writing the library and to learn something about Ruby in the process.

Some interesting treasures contained in the library:

• Miscellaneous thread synchronization helpers
• A Reactor mechanism for multiplexing I/O in a single thread
• Inline C function support
• A call stack for accessing the caller's binding and other information
• Safe message passing (replacements for Object#send() and Object#method) that does not call private and protected methods
• Private instance variables and private class variables that are only available in the class that created them
• New methods requirelocal and loadlocal for requiring/loading a file from the same directory as the calling file.
• Constant methods that are not allowed to change the object they operate on.
• Finalizers that get called before an object gets destroyed.
• Helper classes for working with exceptions
• New types of object references (const ref, mutable ref)