From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2000-12-16T05:54:49+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7348] Re: Packaging Ruby


"Conrad Schneiker" <schneik@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>Aleksi writes:
>
># Nolan Darilek wrote:
[...]
># Dare anyone fantasize more?
>
>Several (round trip) light years ago I found an earlier version of
>perl2exe to be extremely useful.  It has since moved to
>(http://www.indigostar.com/perl2exe.htm):
>
>     Perl2Exe is a command line utility for converting perl scripts to
>     executable files.
>
>     This allows you to create stand alone programs in perl that do not
>     require the perl interpreter. You can also ship the executable
>     file without having to ship your perl source code.
>
>     Perl2Exe can generate executables for Win32 and Unix target hosts.
>
>     Perl2Exe also allows you to create no-console programs using Tk.
>
>I would like to see a Ruby2Exe.

Technically that should be possible?

Take Ruby.  Override the load commands to log which files get
loaded.  Run the program once.  When you are done, create an
executable which is a self-extracting zip, with Ruby at the
start of it, grabbing its dlls and scripts out of the zipped
archive.

I don't think that is quite how perl2exe works, but it is not
too far off.  And support for this approach was seriously
suggested being put in the core of Perl.  (Dunno whatever
happened with that.)

This would give a Ruby2exe which could be run on any platform
and produce appropriate binaries for that platform...

An odd performance note.  In some preliminary tests with Perl
it was found that this unzip on the fly approach was often
faster than reading from disk.  The reason is that CPUs are
a lot faster than disk drives.  The validity of this note
depends greatly on your hardware and OS.

Cheers,
Ben
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