From: "Morris, Chris" <chris.morris@...>
Date: 2002-03-20T05:45:49+09:00
Subject: RE: Development of Windows version of Ruby

> To the best of my knowledge, Ruby DOES work well on Windows.  I have
> written a fairly large Ruby program which runs on Windows and 
> interfaces
> to a specific third-party DLL which in turn interfaces to a 3rd-party
> add-on card.  It worked fine.  The issue under discussion is not "how
> can we make Ruby work well under Windows".  The issue being 
> discussed is
> 
> "What can we do to make a program written to run under a UNIX OS, run
>  equally well under Windows".  This is not a question which 
> is unique to
>  Ruby.  A program written to run under UNIX which uses the 
> fork() system
>  service will have a really difficult time running under 
> Windows.  

Thanks for this. If all we've lost is fork and other ruby things that depend
on it (like Open3.popen3, which is perhaps not a mainstream ruby feature --
are there others? I'd think they'd be limited), then I think we need to post
this somewheres prominent to dispell future vague statements of Ruby not
being all that great on Windows.

Being solely a Windows guy for years, I of course never miss fork because it
doesn't exist for me -- and Ruby's been great. I was more frustrated with
cygwin stuff because it was throwing in these foreign concepts to me. The
MSVC++ move of 1.6.6-0 I think was a good thing. And if fork kills
compatibility of some apps, but it's not a Ruby only problem, then we're
just as well off as the rest of the folks out there with other
tools/languages. 

And anyone who can help get rubicon going on Windows can further aid the
cause of confidence of Ruby on Windows.

Chris