People can choose Ruby to speed up development or C for performance. It's a trade-off between different goals. A compromising approach is to use Ruby and replace the part of performance bottleneck with C extension. This talk will cover a brief introduction of C API in Ruby, and how to create a C/C++ extension Gem.
I am a web developer in roundTAIWANround Inc. from Taiwan, founder of 5xRuby, a book writer, the creator of "exif" and "jaro_winkler" gem, also an active open source contributor in ruby world.