On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 3:21 AM, Victor Costan <costan@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is it feasible to make "FFI.add_sys_types" available on all platforms
> if it's implemented at runtime?
>

You just made me discard my previous message. I was going to ask
exactly the same thing.

I believe these values should be computed at build time and not at
runtime. runtime calculation and shelling out is a hidden requirement
and add complexity to debug it.

Even you put guards to avoid errors, expect bug reports about these
sys types being missing from people not having the development tools
for their platforms at hand.

> I'm thinking ideally the ffi gem will come prebuilt, at least for OSX
> and Windows, so users might not have Xcode / mingw / Vistual Studio.
> To me, the biggest advantage of using ffi is not having to deal with
> all the extension building stuff on a per-gem basis.
>

On this field, I'm working on adding an option to rake-compiler to use
and abuse of RVM and Pik to build fat binaries on all the platforms,
for anyone that cares.

Cheers,
-- 
Luis Lavena
AREA 17
-
Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry