At Tue, 20 Jul 2004 18:50:43 +0900,
James, Roshan (Cognizant) wrote:
> 
> I really agree with your sentiment about wanting to compile ruby
> programs for the purpose of redistribution. That's the problem with all
> the ruby code out there - there is no way I can redistribute it without
> asking people download the ruby interpreter. 
> And they they go "whats that ?... " and the whole story telling process
> starts. 

As has been said before, there _is_ a way to redistribute your
application without asking people to download the
interpreter... Actually, there are 2 ways, the first one is called
Exerb and the second one is called RubyScript2Exe.

I made a very small test application in ruby, turned it into one
executable with RubyScript2Exe, then i used HM NIS Edit to make an
initial script for NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System), which
gave me a simple "Setup.exe".  I have to admit it was a very, very
simple thing, but still it surprised me that it went so easy to make a
good looking installer for it. The only thing the user has to do, is
to run the "setup.exe", no need to even talk about ruby.

RubyScript2Exe http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html
NSIS           http://nsis.sourceforge.net/
HM NIS Edit    http://hmne.sourceforge.net/

> Taking ruby to a popular VM/runtime or native code, IMHO would be a big
> big addition to the acceptibility of the language. I understand that
> that it is a mind boggling amount of work to do this, in any acceptible
> way.

I don't really understand why you think it would be a problem to ask
the user to install the ruby interpreter (the one-click installer),
since you seem to think it would not be a problem to ask the user to
first install for example a JVM to run a Java program... ?

That being said, I would love to see a compiler (to bytecode or to
native code) for ruby too, but then who doesn't ?

Ruben