From: "Frykholm, Niklas" <nfrykholm@...>
Date: 2001-10-04T16:52:20+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22059] Re: Flogging a live Window

>But the difficulty of obtaining gcc on Windows makes it a lot easier to
just
>dualboot Linux where you can get the CD's in the local bookstore or wrapped
>with a magazine - or as easy to download CD images.

Well, for the record, I too do a lot of work in gcc on Windows. I don't
think it is that uncommon.

I don't know what you mean by it being hard to obtain --- what could be
simpler than downloading MinGW or cygwin? I don't think Ruby should send out
the message: buy VC++ or switch too Linux.

Personally I don't care that much which compiler is used, but it should be a
free one. No one should be forced to buy an expensive development
environment to compile Ruby extensions for Windows. 

>Say we support MinGW and gcc with incompatible linker format. This limits
>the number of developers that actually develops extensions for Ruby under
>windows. On the other it may support a large number of extensions developed
>for Unix. But since the majority of these extensions are not precompiled
for
>the MinGW platform, they will effectively be useless to the majority of
Ruby
>users on Windows.

It seems like what you are arguing for is more or less to split the
extension developers in two halves: one doing Unix extensions and one doing
Windows extensions. That's not good, the Ruby community should be kept
together. 

-- Niklas