CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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computergorl
computergorl

Reputation: 153

Is there any support for extending Ruby using C on Heroku?

I am trying to quickly calculate the hamming distance between two 64 bit integers in Ruby. I quickly discovered that even with Ruby's optimized string functions etc. it wouldn't be enough, so I turned to C extensions. For comparison, Pure Ruby benchmarked at about 350,000 comparisons per second and C extensions benchmarked at around 4,000,000.

I used the implementation here and compiled it on my computer where it worked fine. The problem I have is using it on Heroku. I tried ruby extconf.rb make to create the makefile, which worked, and then make to compile it which failed with make: gcc: Command not found. It doesn't matter to me if I do this on deploy or not, but I don't know how to run code automatically at deploy. This has vexed me - if anyone could help it would be much appreciated.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 147

Answers (1)

Eric Himmelreich
Eric Himmelreich

Reputation: 437

You can use Heroku Buildpacks to solve this https://blog.heroku.com/buildpacks

I did some work with the linguist gem which required C extensions to work and solved it by using the correct buildpack.

You can either use a prebuilt buildpack or build your own

Upvotes: 3

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