Allo, friends. Great news. The new Syck is buildable. Yes, it has some problems. The emitter in particular is really, really unstable. Still, it represents several months worth of work rethinking and redesigning parts of the extension.

Here’s what you can look forward to:

• Huge speed improvements when outputting YAML.
• Automatic use of YAML shortcuts, better looking output.
• Simplified custom types. You basically just add tag_as "tag:example.com,2005:myWikiPage" to your class definition. YAML will then load and dump the class using the type.
• Hooks for loading YAML into custom types. Add yaml_new and yaml_initialize methods to your class if you want to override the default behavior.
• Unit tests in C for the core. This is a huge help, since I’m able to track down memory leaks and segfaults much easier.

Again, this extension is really unstable. If you’re going to use it, install it into a temporary directory using ruby install.rb config --prefix=$HOME. Then, in irb, use $LOAD_PATH.unshift File.expand_path( "~/lib" ) before require 'yaml'.

If you want to help debug, come join Yaml-Core. It’s the homebase.