From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@...>
Date: 2001-11-22T00:13:46+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26030] Compiling Ruby Extensions in Windows

Hi,

I have been following the book "Programming Ruby" (the printed
version) and so far everything is great; even the Tk and OLE extensions
work reasonably well for me.  Then I get to the chapter on extending Ruby
using C, which will make, as stated in the book, the possibilities to be
endless...

However, I encountered a problem right away.  I am using Ruby on Windows
95.  The book seems to give very detailed steps and a lot of examples on
how to extend Ruby using C.  But when I ran "ruby extconf.rb" and examined
the created Makefile, even the compiler is written as "gcc".  Therefore my
questions are:

1) Is there any free compiler that people have used successfully to build
extension in C under Windows?

2) Is extconf.rb currently supported in Windows?

I am pretty sure there are people who have compiled Ruby from source and
even created extension in C under Windows.  Can I get some help regarding
the actual steps that I need to follow?

I saw an invitation to vote on which compiler to use on Ruby.  Hopefully
we will not have to use MSVC, which is not free.  Using one of the free
compilers mentioned, can someone give me a direction on how to use it?

P.S. I used Ruby 1.6.3 on Windows, but today I will switch to the (alpha
version of) Ruby 1.6.5 that is available at the Pragmatic Programmers's
site.

Regards,

Bill