"Frykholm, Niklas" <nfrykholm / rsasecurity.com> wrote in message
news:7302FD677189D411813400508B6052F108FA62 / exno02.dynas.se...

> I don't know what you mean by it being hard to obtain --- what could be
> simpler than downloading MinGW or cygwin?

I just have bad experiences downloading cygwin thats.

> I don't think Ruby should send out the message: buy VC++ or switch too
Linux.

No - that would be bad. Linker incompatibility is also bad. Fortunately
Eli-Green seems to have found a solution.

> It seems like what you are arguing for is more or less to split the
> extension developers in two halves: one doing Unix extensions and one
doing
> Windows extensions. That's not good, the Ruby community should be kept
> together.

You are right in that the Ruby community should be kept together. But you
also need to be able write extensions that are Windows specific because the
Windows OS has some rather specific issues. Say you want to write a DirectX
game library driven by Ruby. You could make a similar argument about a
RedHat installer extension package for Linux. That should be possible. Most
extensions should run with no problem on all platforms if they a written in
a decent way. But there should be access to the OS as well.

Mikkel