From: Stefan Schmiedl <s@...>
Date: 2001-11-22T00:25:05+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26031] Re: Compiling Ruby Extensions in Windows

William Djaja Tjokroaminata (2001-11-22 00:13):

> 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...

including the possibility for problems :-)

> 
> 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?

yes. search the web for a download of "cygwin" or "mingw" and you get two
incarnations of extconf.rb's favourite compiler.
cygwin is pretty cool, as it aims at providing unix on windows.
you get a bash-console and lots of neat unix utils, too.

> 
> 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?

get cygwin and do what everybody else does on unix.
of course there will be specific differences.

have fun.

s.