From: gregarican <greg.kujawa@...>
Date: 2006-07-22T10:25:11+09:00
Subject: Re: One-Click Installer: MinGW? or VC2005?


Lothar Scholz wrote:
>
> Ruby still suffers in plattform independence because to much is done
> on unix boxes and ignorance about windows issues among the developers
> is high. The "win32.c" already has to much code that shows that people
> don't have any understanding about the windows plattform
> (take "Kernel::system" for example).
>

I agree with this assertion. In my world I prefer to use Ruby for most
tasks that I take up. But the handful of times I specifically abandon
Ruby for Python is solely due to the fact that my ActiveState Python
install under Windows doesn't hold me back from installing add-on
libraries. So if I can't get something to work under Ruby in Windows
then I just grab the equivalent Python libraries and use Python
instead.

It's usually as simple as running 'python setup.py' from the command
line or even executing an prepacked installation that does the job. No
tooling around with editing makefiles, tweaking the mkmf.rb, setup.rb,
install.rb, etc. as in the case with certain Ruby libraries. As a
language I don't prefer Python but I am familiar enough with it to do
what needs to be done. But while I'm doing it I lament the fact that
I'd rather be doing it in Ruby.

While there is a long thread debating Ruby interpreter performance, to
me the main things I see that perhaps are major drawbacks to Ruby truly
hitting the "big time" are:

1) Obvious lean toward Unix platforms and lack to true cross platform
compatibility in the Windows world.

2) Lack of well documented add-on libraries in certain cases. If you
comment your code well enough and syntactically correct enough just run
RDoc and include this in your package download.

3) Need for targeting embedded devices. From cell phones to PDA's to
smartphones there are lots of cutting edge projects which Ruby could
help expose how truly easy and fun programming them could be. But it
doesn't seem as if there's an overwhelming acknowledgement of this in
the Ruby community as a whole.

A little OT from the subject of mingw versus msvc, but my $0.02
nonetheless.