From: Michael Brooks Date: 2010-09-13T00:57:41+09:00 Subject: Re: What OS do you use for Ruby development? > >From: "Nick Hird" >>Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2010 5:00 AM >>I don't want to start any OS wars. I was just curious as to what OS >> you prefer to run/code ruby in. If you run *nix, what distro? >> Thanks, > > Hello Nick: > > For development I prefer using Windows Vista or 7 if the Gems are > available on Windows but will use Linux Mint if the Gems aren't available > or precompiled for Windows. > > For execution prefer running them on Windows (because that's were most of > my apps are) even if the speed is a little slower most of the time. > > Michael A few folks mentioned their editors, so... my favourite editor is RubyMine (by JetBrains), I only used the trial version and haven't registered it yet but it's slightly better than my previous favourite TurboRuby (by Embarcadero) because it has more smarts and is actively maintained. Both TurboRuby and my previous previous favourite, Arachno Ruby (by Scriptolutions), aren't being actively maintained anymore. All these editors provide a code-completion, syntax checking and debugging experience more like Delphi and Visual Studio (minus the native GUI designers of course). As a side note, it would be really nice if the Windows Ruby installer installed and automatically configure Mingw for GEM compilation so that when I "gem install" something in Windows without a recent pre-built binary that it compiles one just like Linux does. For example, after a few hours I gave up on trying to get the Ruby-OpenAL GEM installed on Windows because it seemed like to much work for the experimenting I wanted to do. I later tryed the same thing on Linux Mint and the install was painless. It would be nice if the experience in the Windows platform was similar. Since the Mingw compiler has made the performance difference between Linux and Windows much smaller I prefer to stay on Windows since I also develop using Delphi. The only real nuisance on Windows is GEM availability. It must be a pain-in-the-tush for GEM developers to make pre-built Windows binaries. I imagine it would helpful to cross-platform consistency / predictably / deployability if there were automatic GEM compilability on Windows too. Michael