On 7/18/06, ara.t.howard / noaa.gov <ara.t.howard / noaa.gov> wrote:
> why is that though?  a VC2005 will still result in a broken ruby that will be
> unable to compile things like sqlite.  what i mean by that it that it will not
> allow one to

No, it won't allow. But that's because Ruby needs to provide that
environment just as Perl has done. However, MINGW is a poor choice
because (1) it is slowly updated, (2) it conforms to a much older ABI,
(3) it doesn't have support for newer APIs, etc., etc., etc. MINGW is
a small step above Cygwin, which is awful for Windows (30%+ slower,
IME).

> in addition, having a decent environment guaranteed for every ruby opens many,
> many possibilities - imagine if this worked for any ruby
>
>   system 'command >/dev/null 2>&1'

I would oppose this. If you're calling #system, you had best know your
platform. /dev/null is not valid -- and never will be valid -- on
Windows.

The #1reason to use VC++ is that it *is* the platform-standard compiler.

MINGW isn't.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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