From: Joe <qbproger@...>
Date: 2008-01-09T10:19:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby questions

On Jan 8, 2008 2:05 PM, Jeff M. <massung@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

rubyscript2exe is windows only.
there is a package to make it a tar, but the user will still have to
install the gems you depend on if I understand it correctly.

Honestly, the best way I've seen to distribute a ruby app to actual
users that I've seen is JRuby.  Compile your program to java bytecode
and you can distribute it in a jar.

The last time this came up some people talked about starkits in tcl,
and suggested something like that for ruby, but it didn't really go
anywhere.

I believe one of the goals in rubinius is to have something similar to
jar for ruby, but i could be wrong about that.
>
> 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.
>
>