From: Eli Green Date: 2001-10-02T14:28:01+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:21919] Re: Let's work on Windows support from Rich Kilmer on 2001-10-02 at 02:10:50: > Excellent idea Dave...I switched to the MinGW installation located (http://www.ruby-lang.org/~eban/ruby/binaries/mingw/) about a month ago (from your distribution) because of random networking issues I was having with Cygwin. I needed a Win32 build that had some of the RAA extensions built for it and was pleased to see that the same site had and ./ext folder with "common" native extensions pre-built. > > One thing I noticed was there was no "support" DLL for MinGW (it cross-compiles to Win32), which is nice. The distribution size is small as well. One issue with MinGW though is the development tools are about 9MB to download (27MB to install). This may be an issue for people wanting to write native extensions (if they need MinGW libraries to do it...this may not be necessary though). I seem to remember that versions of Python compiled with MinGW can't have extensions compiled for them using VC++ and vice-versa. I could be wrong. This would be a pain. Ideally, (see the APR thread :) the source COULD compile under any ANSI C compiler (VC++, MinGW, Cygwin or even LCC). Then there are the Borland users ... > I think that arriving at a single "standard" distribution for Win32 is incredibly important to wider use/success of Ruby. > > Regards, > > Rich Kilmer