From: Edward Diener <eldiener@...>
Date: 2001-11-22T00:53:51+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26036] Re: Compiling Ruby Extensions in Windows

Lost to the MSVC crowd is the fact that Borland puts out a free C/C++ 
compiler for Windows and it is more compatible to the C++ language than 
VC++.

William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

> 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.