From: Daniel Spiewak <djspiewak@...>
Date: 2005-11-08T07:07:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Investigating Ruby - key limitations ?

Ruby does have support for native threads in the form of Proc.new
However, it is recomended that you don't use them except for in
situations where you're doing long running tasks in native code.  This
is because Ruby's lightweight threads spawn *much* faster than the
native Proc threads.

Oh, and technically Ruby doesn't have a VM at all, just an interpreter.
 Except for in two special cases (AFAIK) Ruby isn't compiled at all
(there's a native cross-compiler for Ruby to a windows exe as well as
an experimental Ruby to some perverted Perl byte-code intermediate).
:-)

I do agree that IDEs for Ruby are quite limited.  And really, there's
almost nothing for eRuby, which is to me the most useful application of
Ruby.  For doing development on Windows, I've had to resort to using
Putty to hit a Linux server and using VIM remotely with the eruby
syntax hightlighting package.  Works really well all things considered,
but it's still a less than perfect solution.  I know there's a plugin
for Eclipse that's supposed to do eRuby, but since the web site is in
Japanese and the only translation is filled with special chars and
Japanese linguistic idioms, I've had a hard time experimenting with it.
 Anyway, for most development, RDT works fairly well.