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Recently I had the honor to speak at RubyConf Argentina 2011 (which I must say was a blast).

My talk was titled Tirando Ruby por la Ventana, which translates to Throwing Ruby through the Window

The talk was aimed at highlight a few issues with Ruby on Windows, ranging from the community to the implementation.

Here are the slides:

While the slides are in spanish, you might get the idea from the profiling to all the other charts

But ranting without something to back you up is silly, so I’ve tried to proof that platform is not the issue.

On my slides I showed Fenix a proof-of-concept of harness the power of Windows API just re-implementing File.expand_path function, which was considered one of the culprits of performance issues on Windows.

Fenix as an experiment is a nice sandbox to play with Ruby without the lengthy compilation times on building Ruby from scratch on Windows.

It also helped to have a side-by-side comparison of Ruby own implementation.

But, most important, it served the purpose of document File.expand_path behavior through specs.

Ruby itself has no code to ensure that File.expand_path behave consistently across versions.

The goals were simple:

• * Figure out what Ruby it is supposed to do and document it (specs)
• * Implement the minimum code that make those specs pass
• * Harness the power of newer Windows API
• * Benchmark and compare always

So I have only done the minimum set of requirement to make Rails run, and run faster. There are plenty of corner cases that I didn’t cover and some that I’ve acknowledge in the specs but require its implementation.

The end result is use Fenix as playground to start working on better internals for Ruby itself, but without the tedious build process.

Also, all the work is aiming at Ruby 2.0, since the inner changes on Ruby to accommodate something similar are too big to be included back in 1.9.3

How I’m supposed to test this out?

So I guess you don’t believe in my slides… neither other developer’s conclusions

You can take a look to TheCodeShop builds that already include Fenix and test for your self.

Want to join us make Ruby better?

Please, try out and send us your feedback at TheCodeShop group.

A faster Ruby is possible, we just need to get rid of the legacy stuff and build for the future.

Back in January I posted about Ruby Masters Conf online conference.

I must say that I’m happy to inform that not only was a blast, but RubyInstaller received some financial backing!

Yes, along with Phusion Passenger, RubyInstaller project received donations from the amazing Brazilian Community that attended to Ruby Masters Conf.

Thanks goes to e-Genial too, the company behind the conference.

This contribution is well received, specially in the light of upcoming changes to the project that will be soon announced.

As lead developer of RubyInstaller, to all Brazilians who participated: Muito obrigado!

In case nobody noticed, but next February 25 and 26 there will be a huge conference, called Ruby Mastesr Conf (See the banner bellow)

And yes, the conference will be online with an excellent line up of speakers

Video, chat, slides and interaction with the speakers all using e-Genial online platform, kinda cool, isn’t?

Is cheap! R$ 35 (Brazil reais) is around 21 USD. You gain access to all the talks and if you couldn’t watch them live, you can see the videos 15 days later.

And the awesome part? Their objective is collect money for open source projects, like Phusion Passenger and, wait for it… RubyInstaller !!!

What are you waiting for?

Been a while since the last list of supported Ruby versions was published. So, time of updates!

All of the above results were obtained using rake-compiler 0.7.5.

Compilers

All the tests of compilation where performed against the following compilers:

While there are other cross compilers available out there, I haven’t done any testing against them, so can’t verify it’s correctness in the above results.

I would personally recommend the usage of mingw-w64 compilers since are fresh and updated quite often.

Recommendations

If you’re creating extensions, it is recommend you use both 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 as test-beds for your extensions. That will ensure maximum compatibility with future versions of Ruby.

Next version of rake-compiler will bump the default version to 1.8.7, so is better you start preparing now.

¹ 1.8.6 compilation fails when used with mingw-w64 compiler (i686-w64-mingw32 host)

² You can download mingw-w64 compiler from SourceForge Automated Builds