Hello Rubyvolk,

I'm having a frustrating time trying to get a basic Matlab binding
working for Ruby on Windows, and I'm hoping that somebody will have
some ideas for moving me forward on this.

First, a caveat: I loath Windows, and am expecting that most of my
troubles are due to the fact that some part of my brian required for
Windows to make sense to me is retarded.

What I'm attempting to do is compile a Matlab binding on Windows.  The
binding works fine on *nix machines, but I keep encountering failures
when I try to get it compiled on Windows.

Matlab has its own make process (mbuild) which works with a few
compilers (cl and lcc).  In the process of trying to get this working,
I've discovered that (a) the main pre-compiled Ruby distribution uses
cl, and (b) Ruby won't compile with lcc.  (b) is especially depressing,
because Matlab likes lcc, and I can barely get cl to compile anything
at all.  Ancillory is that it is either impossible or a royal pain in
the tuckus to force mkmf to use mbuild.

Before I go into any more details, then, I'd like to know if anybody
knows whether it is possible to get mkmf to use a different compiler
than whatever was used to compile Ruby.  In other words, to compile
Ruby bindings, is it *required* to use the compiler that was used to
compile the Ruby interpreter?

--- SER