mitchellh/xidl

XIDL is a small Ruby library that reads XIDL files, a format for describing software interfaces, and turns them into objects your Ruby program can work with. Think of it as a translator: instead of manually digging through a structured file to figure out what functions or data it describes, this library handles the parsing for you. XIDL (Extended Interface Definition Language) is an open format, but the README notes that the only known real-world project using it is VirtualBox, the popular virtualization software. The author built this parser specifically to work with VirtualBox's XIDL files, which describe the interfaces to its internal API. The motivation came from the author's own Ruby gem for controlling VirtualBox programmatically. Rather than hard-coding or hand-translating the interface definitions, this library reads them directly from the source XIDL files. It's open-sourced as a standalone library so that if any other project happens to use the XIDL format, the same parsing tool is available. The README is sparse on implementation details, it doesn't describe how the parsing works internally or what specific Ruby objects are produced. Installation is straightforward: it's distributed as a RubyGem, so you install it with a single command. One aspirational goal mentioned is eventually generating a full API from the parsed XIDL, but the README frames that as a longer-term objective rather than a current feature. This is a focused, single-purpose tool. It doesn't try to be a general-purpose XML parser or interface generator, it just reads XIDL files and hands you back structured data. If you're working with VirtualBox in Ruby, or encounter another project using XIDL, this library saves you from writing your own parser from scratch.