From: Jamal Mazrui <Jamal.Mazrui@...>
Date: 2006-07-12T23:45:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Ruby over Python?

brad tilley wrote:

> This may be a trivial reason to most people, but it makes a huge 
> difference to me. I find it _much_ easier to turn .rb scripts into 
> standalone .exe executbales on Windows. I've used Python's py2exe and
it 
> works OK, but Ruby's rubyscript2exe is far better and far easier to
use.

I beg to differ.  py2exe can create stand-alone executables that run the
bundled files from memory, without having to extract them to disk.  As
pre-compiled byte code, execution is also faster than with source code
that has to be initially interpreted.  I appreciate the work that went
into rubyscript2exe, but was dismayed to discover how many temporary
files it extracted, some of them unnecessary to my program, and some
duplicated among themselves in deeper subfolders of my Windows temporary
folder.  Also, since the Ruby interpreter is then run from a temporary
folder rather than the application folder, it makes managing
configuration information more difficult.

Jamal