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ruby-hunspell is a Ruby language extension that wraps around the spell-checking
functions provided by the Hunspell library.

Hunspell library derived from OpenOffice.org's MySpell, and is being used for
recent versions of OpenOffice.org itself.

This extension has been started with the intent to provide an alternative to
rbot's original spell-checking plugin, so that it would use hunspell directly
rather than using the command-line interface of ispell (that is definitely less
elaborated).

The build system is CMake, rather than Ruby's xmkmf-based extbuild.rb script, as
the latter does not support C++ libraries as dependencies. The support scripts
should work just as fine on UNIX-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, ...) and Windows,
so that the extension can be built and used whenever Ruby and Hunspell are
present.

Since version 0.005 the extension is generated through Rust, the ruby
extensions generator developed by myself, derived from the previous
extensions generator that used YAML descriptions of the classes. This
method requires an extra build-time dependency (rust itself), and
requires more symbols to be exported (as STL is used), but it's also a
more flexible way to generate the source code needed.

To try reducing the number of unneeded exported symbols, ruby-hunspell builds by
default with hidden visibility enabled, that requires GCC 4.0 or later, or a
specially patched 3.4. This is really important for the performances, especially
since the bindings will be resolved at runtime, but can be disabled in the
CMakeLists.txt file if needed.

This extension will be called complete when it would be possible to implement
easily drop-in replacements for hunspell's bundled tools written in Ruby rather
than C++.

Unfortunately up to 1.1.4, Hunspell does not provide shared libraries that can
be used by other software, so only static linking is available, and this does
not work, to create a shared extension, on architectures like x86_64.
For this reason, if you want to build ruby-hunspell on those architecture, you
need the libtool patch applied in Gentoo Portage, that builds shared libraries
built with PIC support.

Any feature request, bug report or anything else, please send via e-mail at
    Diego Pettenò <[email protected]>