C + Ruby

It is no secret that Ruby sends messages to invoke methods. So it much slower than in C. If you need speed in accessing instance variables and invoking methods you can use CplusRuby:

With CplusRuby you can define custom C structures from within Ruby and wrap them easily in a Ruby class. You can as well define C functions that can access this structure easily. CplusRuby generates setter/getter methods for every property and wrapper methods for the C functions.

The purpose is speed! The C functions can access the C-structure, which is much faster than accessing instance variables. Also, the C functions can call each other directly. This is *much* faster than invoking a method in Ruby. As wrappers are generated, the Ruby-side can access all C-structures and functions as well.