Posted on Dec 8, 2009

What’s new in rake-compiler 0.7.0

An hour ago I released version 0.7.0 of rake-compiler. See the announcement at RubyInstaller mailing list (CC to Ruby-Talk too, just in case)

JRuby

This new version includes an amazing contribution by Alex Coles that allow compilation and packaging of JRuby extensions and gems!

Yes, it is now possible, under JRuby, to compile JRuby gems that bundle jar files with the extensions.

Even more, with proper tools and a valid JRuby installation, you can even compile extensions from your current 1.8 or 1.9 MRI installation!

Please take a look in the README.rdoc file for more details

Rubinius?

I couldn’t test it myself, but seems that rake-compiler got bundled in latest RC1 of Rubinius. See it for yourself here

Thanks to Rubinius support for Ruby C API and huge reverse engineered mkmf, rake-compiler should work for most of the extensions. Will check that statement later.

So, resistance is futile… the next implementations to be assimilated are MacRuby and MagLev, wanna help me out on that? ;)

What’s next?

At the time I started with rake-compiler, none of the cool tools like Pik or rvm existed.

Because of that, the only way possible to generate fat binaries (mentioned before here) was cross-compiling.

Now that is easy to switch Ruby versions and implementations, it will be possible to implement changes to generate native fat-binaries on any platform.

This functionality is planned, but not ETA yet. Want to help? Fork the project on GitHub and start right now!