From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@...>
Date: 2005-10-02T13:37:53+09:00
Subject: Re: why can't Ruby load .gem files directly?

On 10/2/05, Jim Weirich <jim@weirichhouse.org> wrote:
>
> 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.

The shared library part makes sense. I didn't even get close to that
in my little prototype.

It seems that the interpreter itself would need to natively support
gem files and be able to load shared libraries from them directly
before you could get away from having the separate install step. It
would be interesting to have gems with C source that are compiled on
demand (given the right setup on the installation machine) and then
used directly. So for example you would start off with
binlib-1.0-src.gem and afterwards have the src gem and then
binlib-1.0.gem with the embedded shared libs. But maybe you guys on
the RubyGems team already considered all this and have several good
arguments against it.

Ryan