From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-11-12T08:39:32+09:00
Subject: Re: enterprise ruby

Rick DeNatale wrote:
> All of which misses my point.
> 
> Unless and until extensions can be written which are portable against
> Ruby, JRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius ... the Ruby 'market' will be
> fragmented.

Only as far as extensions go. I don't advocate writing extensions; 
rather, I advocate using rich in-language capabilities to call platform 
libraries, as you can do in JRuby. You can extend JRuby without ever 
having to write what would be considered an "extension" in MRI. If MRI 
had a similar capability, (or perhaps if DL was use more and in better 
shape) there would be less fragmentation, since anything 
platform-specific could be wrapped by a nice Ruby library, and no C or 
Java code would have to be shipped.

It's the very fact that Ruby extensions are written in C and compiled 
with C compilers to shared libraries with very specific constraints that 
limits their general applicability to other implementations (and limits 
evolution of core Ruby development as well).

So I would propose that what you're saying is right...and that writing 
C-based extensions by hand just aggravates the problem, since C-based 
extensions are never going to be generally applicable to all 
implementations.

- Charlie