From: Robert Klemme Date: 2007-10-05T01:15:02+09:00 Subject: Re: cygwin's Ruby On 04.10.2007 17:18, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: >> On 10/4/07, Jay Levitt wrote: >>> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007 18:15:36 +0900, Robert Klemme wrote: >>> >>>> I'm curious: why do you discourage usage of cygwin's ruby? >>> Good question; I actually rarely use my Win32 Ruby install anymore, >>> finding >>> it much easier to launch everything, including Rails, from cygwin, where >>> all the gems have no problem building their own extlibs. >>> >>> I develop in Eclipse, which of course is not a cygwin app, but I just >>> point >>> it at the cygwin interpreter and forget that I have two separate >>> environments. I keep a cygwin bash window open (via rxvt) so I can do >>> irb, >>> run scripts, etc. > > Cygwin is a crutch. It's a damn good crutch -- don't get me wrong about > that. But quite frankly, if you want to develop Windows applications, > use native Windows tools. If you want to develop LAMP applications, use > LAMP, not Cygwin emulating LAMP. Hm, cygwin is also a convenient crutch: installing and updating is pretty easy. No hassle with compiling etc. Frankly, I had expected a bit more technical detail on deficiencies that would discount cygwin's Ruby. > I'm guessing this answer isn't going to please a lot of people, but in > my opinion, your realistic options on a Windows platform are probably > jRuby and IronRuby, in that order. jRuby is in great shape as far as I > can tell, and it might well be faster than Cygwin Ruby by now. I'll let > John Lam speak for the status of IronRuby, but for now it looks like > jRuby is a few months ahead of it. I don't do GUI programming with Ruby and cygwin's Ruby has served me well so far. I also did not notice significant performance hits (but then again, I didn't really benchmark different Ruby versions - I just always found it fast enough). So far I'm more concerned with performance on a Sun box where the Ruby install seems to crawl... :-) Kind regards robert