[ruby-talk:04134] Re: What are you using Ruby for?

Hi,

Robert Feldt wrote:

> The Ruby features I'd love to see / things I'd love to find out:
>
> * Being able to "freeze" an object and dump it to an exe that can be
> executed stand-alone (without interpreter or external libs/exts) on a
> non-Ruby aware machine. I distribute my jobs on a network of workstations
> and it's not very nice to have to install Ruby on all of them prior to
> execution.

Is there any prospect for something like this in Ruby 1.7 or 1.8, but where the
single exe file includes the interpreter and the needed libs? Sort of like
perl2exe? (And with the same tolerable restrictions about not being able to eval
in previously unmentioned libraries.)

Although not glamorous, the mundane capability of easily creating a single file
that can be run without installing other stuff would be a useful capability for
increasing the utility and usage of Ruby. For instance, I know of some large
departments of cutting-edge high-tech corporations (which I am not in any way
presently associated with) that are open to distribution of Perl applications as
standalone executables, but who for various reasons don't want people going
around installing Perl on desktops, messing with servers, and so on.

> * Anyone actually doing GUI stuff on Wintel machines? Didn't put much
> effort into it, but I couldn't get TK to work...

Given (1) that (AFAIK)  the first "specialty" books for Perl and Python involved
Tk,  (2) that Perl has it's own Tk newsgroup, (3) that Tk is probably still the
greatest GUI common denominator for open source languages, and (4) that there are
probably about as many (if not more) users and developers on Wintel platforms at
the moment as on all others combined, I think that it would be beneficial for
Ruby if Tk on Windows were in better shape.

(There may be something of a catch-22 here: if Rubywin/Tk were in good shape, it
might attract more Perl/Tk and Python/Tkinter converts who could help maintain
and improve it.)

--
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)