pycall.rb

You can even use the under-the-radar PyCall gem[1] if you find you need a little peanut butter for your chocolate. I discovered it recently, and it has been great to be able to use various Python NLP libraries without having to learn a new stdlib, deployment stack, etc. [1] https://github.com/mrkn/pycall.rb

Sure! It's quite simple: works like a charm. Completely transparent. You `import` with Python-like syntax, and you get a Ruby object that transparently forwards any message (i.e. method calls) to the corresponding Python object on the underlying Python interpreter. This means that Ruby does not need to know _anything_ about the Python object: whatever you call on the Ruby object is just forwarded to the Python one, and whatever result is passed back to Ruby. About the overhead, I sincerely do not know; I expected to have some so my code does part of the image pre-processing directly in Python (`narray`) in order to pass a smaller object to Ruby, but besides that I could perceive none -- grain of salt advised, as that was possibly hidden from me because my computation in Ruby was orders of magnitude more complex/time consuming than what w

I agree. I love Ruby. Not just the language, but the values of the community. Don't give up. Try SciRuby. I also recently discovered pycall, for those times when something really doesn't exist yet in Ruby. Of course, if it doesn't exist, that's an opportunity to make it yourself! 1: https://github.com/SciRuby 2: https://github.com/mrkn/pycall.rb