From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2008-01-02T16:56:31+09:00 Subject: Re: Windows Ruby (was Re: Zed Shaw - Ruby has dodged a bullet) Sam Smoot wrote: > The point was it's just a huge pain, and I've asked about Windows C- > extensions here before and I obviously still have no clue what I'm > talking about when it comes to VC6 vs VC8 vs whatever... ;-) Well, briefly -- in most cases, a Ruby extension written in C needs to be compiled and "linked" (converted to a DLL) with the same tool set that was used to compile and link the Ruby executable. So ... if you rebuild the Ruby executable with gcc, you need to recompile and relink any C-language extensions that way as well. And people who provide binary gems for Windows Ruby need to provide them compiled with the same compiler/linker that was used to build Ruby. So there needs to be some kind of working consensus as to who does what when with which tools, or nothing works except pure Ruby. > I will say I don't personally know any Windows/Ruby people using > anything but the OCI. Even now that I have a fair amount of experience > with *nix machines, just the idea of getting Cygwin running scares me. > I won't say it's not an option for Windows devs, but I will say I > don't think it's realistic for Cygwin/MiniGW (for Ruby specifically) > to ever gain anywhere near the deployment OCI has. I use both the OCI and Cygwin Ruby *occasionally*, but I'm always careful not to lock myself into either. I've never used MinGW, but I do have it on the machine because some other open source software depends on it. Cygwin is easy to install and maintain. You go to www.cygwin.com, download and run "setup.exe", and you get a graphical installer that downloads stuff and puts it on your machine. I originally installed it because I didn't want to buy a commercial X terminal emulator for Windows, but I have since installed the whole enchilada. You *can* run all the LAMP-stack servers on it, and you can run Rails on it. But it's not the "preferred" way of doing those things.