From: "Jeff M." <massung@...>
Date: 2008-01-09T04:05:03+09:00
Subject: Ruby questions

Hello, peeps. I'm dipping my feet into Ruby waters (from Smalltalk).
Just have some questions that I hope someone doesn't mind answering.
I'm on OS X 10.5.

I see that Ruby 1.9 is out and Leopard shipped with 1.8.6. I also
heard that 1.9 would introduce a new VM that would be significantly
faster than 1.8. Is that the case? If so, is there a standard way of
getting 1.9 on OS X or am I kinda stuck waiting for Apple to "do their
thing"?

I'm primarily playing around with GLUT and OpenGL in Ruby for fun.
This required getting ruby-opengl through gems (note: I think the idea
of gems is slick!). However, if I ever wanted to distribute my code or
a program, is there a proper way of distributing everything needed
with it? Is there a way of generating native executables or at least
combining the ruby executable with the source so that 2 years from now
my program still runs the same even though I have version 3.8 of ruby?

Perhaps I've missed this in documentation, but am I able to extend a
class without subclassing? Something akin to "loose methods" in
Smalltalk?

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read/answer any of these. I
appreciate it.

Jeff M.