From: "Reggie Mr" <buppcpp / yahoo.com>
>
> MS needs to evolve also, do you expect MS to continue to enhance MS-DOS.

Since you asked... No.  <grin>  But MS-DOS is frightfully in need of enhancement,
evolution, and (in non-mystical terms) intelligent design.  Not that I expect any of
that to occur.  :)

> It you are new to Ruby and need to compile it for the first and then 
> have to go thru the problem of setting up a toolchain, MinGW, etc...this 
> becomes a huge turnoff for using Ruby.
> 
> Windows products should use Windows compiler...VC++.

I'll admit I used to agree.  Back when ruby on Windows was built on cygwin,
I used to run into weird problems like a compiled-in 256-meg RAM allocation
limit, or such.

Back then, the choice between cygwin and VC++ seemed clear.

Now that I'm trying to write applications in ruby on Linux, OS X, and Windows,
and am dealing with building non-standard extensions on Windows like
RMagick, math3d, OpenGL, freeglut, FTGL, OpenAL, ruby-gstreamer, I 
really think it would be a time-saver to have a consistent extension-build
toolchain between these platforms.

So even though my vote several years ago would have been for VC++,
It's for MinGW/msys now.


Regards,

Bill