From: Lyle Johnson Date: 2002-04-10T10:38:26+09:00 Subject: Re: Best Ruby for Windows ? > Windows version of our software. I've seen previous emails on this > list to the effect that the cygwin port of Ruby to windows is going > away. Facts: 1. The Cygwin port of Ruby is not "going away", unless Matz made this announcement while I wasn't looking. 2. One option for obtaining a Cygwin build of Ruby is to build it yourself, from the source code. 3. A perhaps-more-convenient option is to download precompiled Cygwin/Ruby binaries from eban's site (http://www.ruby-lang.org/~eban/ruby/binaries/cygwin/). 4. Looks like eban also has precompiled binaries for MinGW and DJGPP. 5. The precompiled Windows installer provided by Andy Hunt has changed from a Cygwin-based build to a Visual C++ (or "mswin32") based build. > Sorry for taking so long to get to the point -- I don't need > Ruby threads currently, but if they don't work under the mswin port, > it makes me a little nervous about what else might or might not > work correctly. Can anyone who has used the mswin port of Ruby, > or who has ported a Ruby-based application from Linux to Windows > give me any advice / input / things to watch out for? What I have seen with FXRuby is that something related to threads isn't consistent for the "mswin32" build. The bit in FXRuby that attempts to periodically yield control to Ruby's thread scheduler (by calling rb_thread_wait_for) hangs up for the mswin32 build. The same source code works correctly under Linux and Cygwin; I've also read that it works properly under MinGW, although I haven't confirmed this myself. As an aside, it is very curious to me that the MinGW version would work and the mswin32 version would not. After all, they're both using Microsoft's runtime libraries (msvcrt.dll) -- only the compiler used to compile the code is different (gcc versus Visual C++). Like I said, I haven't confirmed for myself that FXRuby's threads stuff works with MinGW, only heard it through the grapevine. > Also, does anyone know if the extconf.rb / mkmf method for creating > a Ruby extension will create a usable makefile if executed on a > Windows platform using the mswin port of Ruby? Yes, I can confirm this.