Book Image

Crystal Programming

By : George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal
Book Image

Crystal Programming

By: George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal

Overview of this book

Crystal is a programming language with a concise and user-friendly syntax, along with a seamless system and a performant core, reaching C-like speed. This book will help you gain a deep understanding of the fundamental concepts of Crystal and show you how to apply them to create various types of applications. This book comes packed with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples. You'll learn how to use Crystal’s features to create complex and organized projects relying on OOP and its most common design patterns. As you progress, you'll gain a solid understanding of both the basic and advanced features of Crystal. This will enable you to build any application, including command-line interface (CLI) programs and web applications using IOs, concurrency and C bindings, HTTP servers, and the JSON API. By the end of this programming book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to use Crystal programming for building and understanding any application you come across.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started
5
Part 2: Learning by Doing – CLI
10
Part 3: Learn by Doing – Web Application
13
Part 4: Metaprogramming
18
Part 5: Supporting Tools

Chapter 7: C Interoperability

This chapter is going to focus on one of the more advanced Crystal features: the ability to interop with existing C libraries by writing C Bindings. This Crystal feature allows you to reuse highly optimized and/or robust code within Crystal without writing a line of C or taking on the non-trivial task of porting all of it to Crystal. We will cover the following topics:

  • Introducing C bindings
  • Binding libnotify
  • Integrating the bindings

libnotify provides a way to emit desktop notifications as a means to provide non-intrusive information to the user as events occur. We are going to leverage this library to emit our own notifications.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to write C bindings for existing libraries and understand how to best hide the implementation details of the bindings from the end user. C bindings allow Crystal code to leverage highly optimized C code, or simply allow reusing code without needing to port...