Non-C extension support

[headius]

I would like to be able to support this library in JRuby, but the C extension is a limiting factor. JRuby does not support the CRuby extension API.

We do, however, support some alternative mechanisms for binding native libraries:

• Ruby FFI: this would require some manual work to write the FFI binding, but since you have a standalone C library it might make the most sense. See sassc for an example library that ships a standalone dynamic library with an FFI binding.
• Java Native Runtime (JNR) FFI: This is our current Java/C-based FFI backend, and upon this we build Ruby FFI and several other features in JRuby. Supporting JNR would make this library accessible to the entire JVM community, including JRuby.
• Java Foreign Function and Memory API: This is a new API in recent versions of Java designed to integrate with the JVM memory model and JIT (for better performance). It also supports a code generator called "jextract" that can generate the entire API binding from a header file.

Some combination of these APIs should get us there!

[mohamedhafez]

I'd be willing to put a bounty of a couple thousand dollars on this, if the trilogy team agrees to allow work on this...