From: Joshua Haberman <joshua@...>
Date: 2005-10-02T13:27:22+09:00
Subject: Re: why can't Ruby load .gem files directly?

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On Oct 1, 2005, at 9:08 PM, Jim Weirich wrote:
> On Saturday 01 October 2005 11:12 pm, Joshua Haberman wrote:
>
>> If Ruby could load .gem files directly, you would immediately support
>> any use case, because they would be as flexible as single .rb files:
>>
>
> Actually, this was strongly considered in early versions of gems.   
> It would
> require a require hack that is much more intrusive than the current  
> one
> RubyGems uses now.  The real stopper was that we didn't see an easy  
> way to
> support shared libraries (.so's and .dll's) on all the different  
> platforms.

I'm not sure what you mean by that.  Could you elaborate (or point me  
to documentation that provides more detail about this problem)?

Do gems attempt to be platform-independent even where there are C  
extensions, and compile extensions at gem install time?  That doesn't  
sound like a very good idea.

If gems that have C extensions were kept platform-specific, there  
shouldn't be a problem with shared libraries.

Josh

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