As noted else where, ruby 1.9.1 hasn’t exactly bounded out of the gate. That’s not particularly surprising, considering 1.9.1 has been available for only a couple of months and requires changes to existing code. In addition, there are a number of incompatible gems, giving rise to the isitrub19y website as a clearing house of information. So despite the great efforts from the Rails team, the rest of the community is still lagging behind.

That’s particularly true on Windows, where a new one-click installer isn’t yet available. According to the latest market share stats from Net Applications, Windows controls 88% of the desktop market. I have no idea how many Ruby installations exist, and how they are divided by operating system. But looking at RubyForge, by far and away the most popular download of all times is the Windows one-click installer with over 3 million downloads.

Luis Lavena has taken over stewardship of the one-click installer, and clearly needs a bit of help. So although I have very little free time, I offered to pitch in as I could. While Luis is concentrating on putting together a new version of the one-click installer using Mingw and msys, I thought I could help out by putting 1.9.1 through its paces on Windows.

My basic approach was to simply start with the basics:

Build ruby with Visual Studio 2008

Build the default extensions and libraries Ruby uses (zlib, iconv, openssl, etc)

Run Ruby’s unit tests

That was almost a month ago. Thirty-nine patches later (I have no doubt Nobu is getting sick of me), I just about have Ruby 1.9.1’s test suite running on Windows. There a still a few remaining issues, in particular a couple of imap tests that hang.

As for Visual Studio, I’m using it for two reasons. First, it has a lights-out debugger that makes it much easier to track down and fix problems. Second, its lets you compile instrumented executable and libraries that can detect incorrect API usage, heap corruption, stack corruption and mismatched calling conventions.

It quickly became obvious that no one had ever done that with Ruby, because it turned up a whole host of issues. For example, the dl extension used the cdecl calling convention to call the Windows API instead of stdcall. Or that there were a set of memory leaks in printf/sprintf.

The other thing that was bothersome was the huge number of compiler warnings generated by building Ruby. See for your self – and then realize the original list doesn’t include any of the warnings generated by building Ruby’s extensions. Cleaning up the warnings took a number of patches, but at this point most of them have been fixed. And all credit to Nobu for working through my patches, fixing them and applying them since my knowledge of the Ruby runtime is fairly limited, thereby causing most of my patches to not be quite right.

Anyway, since its not all that obvious how to build Ruby on Windows (with Visual Studio or Mingw), I’ll see if I can put together a few posts that describe how to do it for anyone who wants to roll their own.