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.

It is important to mention that most of these issues in Ruby land are generated due the lack of documentation associated on how to properly install MySQL and its related dependencies.

Most of us expect things to Just Work, and we often compare the installation process to installing to Linux or OSX which works out of the box.

What is not mentioned in the documentation installation is that development tools (a compiler) and specific headers and libraries are required. Unless you’ve already installed them, these development artifacts are usually missing from a Windows computer.

What I’m going to describe next is how I installed and configured my environment and how I made it work properly. YMMV if you decided to use different versions of the components I used for this.

Let’s get started:

Download the right version of MySQL

As I mentioned before, I’m using a 64bits version of Windows, so I think it will be best if I download a matching bits version.

So went ahead and visited MySQL download site:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql

And selected MySQL Community Server 5.5.13.

From the versions offered, downloaded Windows (x86, 64-bit), MSI Installer

Install MySQL

Invoked the installer and presented with the normal installation wizard.

You can follow the next sequence of images to use my same settings.

Is good to always install your Data files outside the default program installation directory, that way, you can safely upgrade your installation and not to worry about an installer removing your data files.

Ok, so let’s move to the next thing…

Before installing MySQL/Ruby bindings

Update: mysql gem version `2.9.0` already fix the issues shown here. Install it normally and follow the on-screen instructions.

In order to use my brand new MySQL installation, now I need to install the MySQL bindings for it.

But, there is a small detail: Ruby is 32bits and my MySQL is 64bits, this means I can’t use MySQL provided libraries from Ruby.

Bummer! You told me to install the 64bits version!

Don’t despair! MySQL Connector to the rescue!

That is right, MySQL has something called Connector, the purpose of that library is to avoid a complete MySQL installation when you just need to connect to a remote one.

It comes in different flavors, we are interested in C language support, since that is the language Ruby uses for it’s extensions.

We are going to download a 32bits connector and use it!

So, at my web browser again, decided to visit the MySQL Connector/C download page:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/c/

Since I’m not interested in installing this Connector and pollute my clean 64bits installation, I’m going to download the non-installer version.

I scrolled down the listing until I saw the noinstall 32bits version:

mysql-connector-c-noinstall-6.0.2-win32.zip

Decided to extract it to the root of my disk, so I ended with a folder named mysql-connector-c-noinstall-6.0.2-win32 in there.

Remember: extract into a folder without spaces. The same goes for your Ruby installation and the DevKit installation.

Time to install MySQL/Ruby bindings

So, now that all MySQL prerequisites are in place, will open a new command prompt and prepare to install the gem.

This time I’m going to use Ruby 1.9.2, properly installed and configured with the complementary Development Kit (DevKit) which is provided at RubyInstaller website (In case you haven’t installed yet, don’t forget to follow the installation instructions in the wiki)

OK, so in a Command Prompt, will type the gem installation command:

gem install mysql --platform=ruby -- --with-mysql-dir=C:/mysql-connector-c-noinstall-6.0.2-win32

Note the use of forward slashes for the directory where MySQL Connector/C was extracted.

The above command contains two special things:

First, we are telling RubyGems that we want the ruby platform of mysql gem. This particular platform is the one that contains the source code and this will allow us to skip the pre-compiled version of the gem.

The second part, which is added after two dashes, are the additional arguments that we are giving to the gem configuration process to locate our MySQL headers and libraries for successful compilation.

As result of this command, you will see something like this:

Fetching: mysql-2.8.1.gem (100%)
Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed mysql-2.8.1
1 gem installed

Which indicates the gem installed successfully.

In case you obtained a different result, please refer to RubyInstaller Troubleshooting page:

https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/wiki/Troubleshooting

And try the proposed solutions there.

Using the bindings

Now that we installed the gem, we can remove the connector folder we first extracted. Before do that, first we need to take out a file from there: libmysql.dll. This file is required by the gem we compiled and needs to be available for it.

You can find it inside the lib directory of MySQL Connector.

I personally recommend you place it along your Ruby installation, inside the bin directory.

If you have multiple Ruby installations and you use Pik to change between them, you can place the library in the same directory Pik is installed. You need to remember that it is important the libmysql.dll file is on the PATH when you need to use it.

OK, after all that big red warning, let’s test this thing on a IRB console:

irb> require "rubygems"
irb> require "mysql"
irb> conn = Mysql.connect "localhost", "root", "abc123"
irb> result = conn.query "SELECT 1"
irb> result.num_rows
=> 1
irb> result.fetch_row
=> ["1"]
irb> result.free
irb> conn.close
irb> exit

Great!, now you have not just a working MySQL installation but also Ruby configured to talk to it!

Hope you enjoyed this post as I did enjoy creating it. Hope this ease your path on using MySQL with Ruby on Windows.

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!

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?

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

Is quite common use coloring in the output of your tools to indicate an error
or a success, or some sort of information.

To make things easy, there is something called ANSI escape sequences which has great support on Unix systems, but not Windows.

Back in DOS days, there was something called ANSI.SYS which allowed certain ANSI codes to work.

But DOS has been dead for quite some time, and Windows (32 and 64 bits) had no more this nice ANSI support.

Instead, Microsoft created a lot of functions that make it more easy to use screen buffers, flip between them to avoid flickering and other stuff, but we (developers) loose the ability to use colors across platforms transparently from the code perspective.

Because of that, and because we are eager to use colors (remember, we all love colors), developers created libraries on every language that mimic ANSI sequences on Windows using the Win32 console functions.

Java, Perl and others all have their implementation.

In the case Ruby, it does too, as port from Perl’s Win32::Console module by Gonzalo Garramuno which then was packaged as gem by Justin Bailey and is currently maintained by me.

With the move of Ruby to version 1.9.x, certain changes were required and still suffer from some compatibility issues, speed been one.

Thanks to the Internet, we found a little gem hidden on the tubes called “ANSICON” created by Jason Hood, which provides — in C — ANSI escaping codes completely independent of your language of choice.

ANSICON works hooking your console process and any program, extracting any ANSI sequence automatically and translating to the proper Win32 console API.

It works under 32 and 64 bits systems.

What all that means to me?

I proposed the deprecation of win32console and replace it with ANSICON, but what are the benefits of it?

• Proven to work under several scenarios
• Its written in C, not Ruby, which make it available to any other language
• Its faster than win32console
• One less gems for me to maintain

Now, how to use this?

Well, projects like RSpec and Cucumber haven’t still been adapted to use ANSICON yet, but developers are working to provide the changes.

First, you will need to visit ANSICON GitHub page and download the binaries:

https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon/downloads

Grab at least package (1.31) and extract its contents somewhere (newer is better).

Depending on your system architecture, copy the contents of x86 (32bits) or x64 (64bits) to a folder that you have in your PATH. On previous post I’ve recommended have a Tools\bin folder inside your HOME. See my binfiles README for suggestions

Now that ansicon.exe and it’s support libraries are placed there, you can start it manually:

ansicon

That will simply create a new cmd.exe with ANSICON hooks enabled. At any time you can type exit and return to your previous cmd.exe process that is clean of ansicon.

I will recommend you read the README file that comes with ANSICON to know about permanently install ANSICON in your system.

Now, let’s get back to an example:

puts "\e[34mHello \e[31mWorld\e[0m"

In this case, I entered manually the escape codes. If you’re serious for colors, take a look to term-ansicolor

Anyhow, now let’s execute our program:

ruby hello.rb

On a normal prompt, we got something like this:

But, powered by ansicon, we get this lovely result:

Now, extra to that, ANSICON advertise certain information into the ANSICON environment variable

C:\Users\Luis>ECHO %ANSICON%
100x3000 (100x28)

In that variable, we have 4 values. The first two are buffer dimensions and the ones between parenthesis are the size of my visible console.

For example, you can use the visible size information to truncate rows of information.

So what, why care?

Unless you suffer from color blind-ness, colors are useful. Tools like RSpec communicate visually errors from other states using colors.

ANSICON offers a less intrusive approach than previous solutions for coloring, less work for me and more fun for you!

Start using it today!

Over the past month some of these changes materialize and others are still in progress. Consider the following post an status update of the project.

RubyInstaller is been promoted in Ruby-Lang website.

Yes! finally RubyInstaller downloads are displayed first in Ruby’s download page

This marks an important step for the project and it’s goals of make it more easy to try out Ruby on Windows. One less pebble on our path.

Ruby 1.9.2-p0 release and GCC 4.5.0 been used

So 1.9.2-p0 went out, so was RubyInstaller package of it. It felt great release the newer packages just 2 days after the official source code release.

I must admit that it was only possible thanks to the hard work of all the contributors and the ones that prefer to remain anonymous.

Lots of buzz

Since I declared One-Click Installer dead and put the initial bricks for RubyInstaller back in 2007, lot of things happened.

Over the past years thanks to many developers, the project has gained visibility and with it, a bigger user base.

I found that with the diversity of the growing user base, it also increased and exposed issues in the way we work with the project and deal with either bugs, feature requests or even support.

It is hard to keep everybody pleased and is hard to teach people coming to Ruby for the first time how to deal with things they never needed in their dotNET or Java jobs.

It is even harder when the first thing they hear are negativity to their environment (yes, Windows ala windoze, windblows, etc)

So we decided to put all the collective knowledge in our Wiki, specially the Tutorials page. It is interesting to see how that particular page grew over the past 6 months.

Even more interesting and satisfying is see that not only individuals are paying attention to the project but even groups like Pragmatic Studio and their Ruby on Rails training program acknowledge Windows users and provide instructions for getting them started.

Still lot to do

Work on the DevKit installer still goes as we adjust minor details to improve the first time experience and the support for both RubyInstaller and possibly JRuby.

People has been asking to get the DevKit included in the same Ruby package because that will reduce the errors users get. Not everybody needs to compile things all the time.

I personally don’t believe that will fix the education and lack of documentation problem, it will just make the installers 12MB bigger.

We need your help

The project needs more people involved. There is not a huge technical barrier to get started, just the willingness to get things done.

Either you want to document things (tutorials and such) or help out others with issues. Anything you want to do will be appreciated.

More to come

I’m trying to improve the cross-compilation support of Ruby so Linux/OSX developers can provide compatible code for other Windows users. Lot to be done there.

Other exciting things are coming and will post in follow ups. Enough for today!

I would like to summarize in this blog post what has been going on with RubyInstaller project and what is coming up.

On a previous post I mentioned we reached RubyInstaller goal of provide a stable installer and a series of tools to ease the life of Ruby developers using Windows.

Of course, perfection is a myth, and is good to know that you can always improve what you did before.

But, where to start?

Development Kit as installer

We start looking to what users said on Twitter, our group and of course the bug tracker. We noticed one of the big problems: the Development Kit and complicated instructions.

As you might know already, Windows do not come with development tools out of the box. Even more, if you opt for Microsoft ones (Visual Studio) you might end having issues with GNU tools or projects that do not support MSVC very good.

We took the approach of using Free Software, and base our work on GCC and MinGW project which made more easy for us redistribute things ready for you to use.

A proper DevKit installer is under works, at this time a 7z and self extracting packages can be generated, but the installer will do more stuff, which you find more about it in our group.

Upgrading to GCC 4.5.0

One of the reasons we moved from Visual C 6.0 to GCC was that the compiler was no longer available (and also cost money). Now, it is time to move to a newer version of GCC, to take advantage of specific optimization flags and improved debugger (GDB).

All the components which lack GCC binaries for Windows are built from source for RubyInstaller project.

You can checkout use-devkit branch at GitHub
use-devkit branch has been merged into master.

This proved two important things: our DevKit is able to compile out of the box some projects without tweaks, and two, we are eating our own food.

Getting ready for Ruby 1.9.2

Yes, Ruby 1.9.2 final is coming out soon, and we can say RubyInstaller provided a rc2 for experimentation 2 months ago, and we are building newer packages for further testing.

We hope be able to deliver RubyInstaller 1.9.2 binaries as soon 1.9.2 gets out.

We still need you, and your feedback

Please keep in mind all the contributors are doing all this work in their free time.

Help is always welcome and appreciated. There is not a specific set of skills required, just the willingness to help.

Feedback is important too, and will love hear from your experiences using RubyInstaller, no matter how weird or Rails-related is the thing you’re working on.

That’s all, as I said, exciting stuff coming soon.

RubyInstaller packages released.

Last details of RubyInstaller installers itself was sorted out a month ago, but was holding the release because wanted to be 100% sure nothing else breaks. I should have known better, you can never be 100% sure, so decided to stop stalling and release the final versions.

You can find the installers or 7-zip packages at our website in the download section:

http://rubyinstaller.org/

Which BTW, sports the new design from the pledgie, do you like it? (Sure I do)

What to expect?

RubyInstaller team worked providing installers that works seamlessly across different versions of Windows, environments and a bunch of wacky requirements.

A few points:

• Releases for newer version of Ruby will be delivered more often, really.
• You can install RubyInstaller as normal user without requiring administrative rights (good for lock-down computers).
• Installer do not mess with your system or other Ruby installations
• You can safely uninstall it and your gems or customizations will be kept
• It is extremely fast to install
• It is easy to embed in other installers (silent installation mode).

But that’s not all!

Indeed, more stuff is published to RubyForge now: Experimental

Experimental will be the section dedicated to preview or beta version of Ruby. Right now you can find newer 1.9.2-preview3 version, just released a few weeks ago. Ideally, once it hits final, we will provide installers.

In the mean time, you can experiment with it and help Ruby community improve it’s support for Windows.

Please report any Ruby bug from it to Ruby Redmine bug tracker.

What is next?

We haven’t defined a Roadmap for the installers yet. The next target in the queue is 1.9.3, which is been worked in a separate branch since it requires newer libraries been build.

You can checkout this at our repository

Thank you!

Last but not least I personally want to thank all the developers and users that provided feedback about the installer, the building recipes and helped out with support details at the group.

Without them nothing could have been possible!

Feedback or questions?

Just join us at RubyInstaller group and we will happily answer them

What’s new?

Only two new things: STDERR is now redirected (wasn’t before) and the addition of ECHO on/off functionality thanks to Justin Love

How to install?

You can read previous post with installation instructions, since it is a prerelease, please test it and report me any new issue here

Known Issues

AutoSpec is known to have problems, but is not an issue of win32console, as you can read in GH-3

Cheers!