From: MikkelFJ <mikkelfj-anti-spam@...>
Date: 2002-07-31T07:57:12+09:00
Subject: Ruby Portable Runtime?

Hi all, it's been a long time since I last posted here, pleased to see so
many bright people still hanging out :-)

The Pragmatic Programmer installation recently dumped Cygwin and supported
native Windows instead.
Which is a good thing IMHO.

Meanwhile I've on and off seen various attempts to create generic portable
runtime layers in C.

The last one I noticed was Apache Portable Runtime APR.

http://apr.apache.org/

Also, Appache has finally decided to ship on Windows in a decent 2.0 version
with reservations such as bad performance compared to Windows. They did work
a lot with getting thread synchronization work the same on Linux on Windows.

This makes me wonder, given

a) Web is becoming more and more the target platform
b) APR seems to be carefully and thoroughly developed.
c) mod_ruby / eruby seems to be maturing.

Would it make sense to base the Ruby runtime on APR in future versions? To
some extend Posix seems to have failed in the sense that it doesn't work
properly on Windows.

I'm sure there are problems with APR in various areas, but they must have
done something right or?

While persuing this thought I also bumped into someone wanting to port the
OCaml runtime to APR (OCaml being my other favorite language), so I guess
I'm not the only one thinking of APR as a potential future OS cross platform
layer.

Mikkel