I got an e-mail response from the author of SWin Ruby library (see my yesterday's blog). He uses Cygwin version of Ruby, so thus he is neither maintaining nor publishing native Windows libraries. There is a link to the Cygwin version of the binary library, so my rant was misdirected.
[Here is the i386msvcrt version of the library taken from another distribution: swin.so. Copy it into $RUBY_HOME/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i386msvcrt]
Which leads me to another point. Many developers on Windows opt for working under Cygwin because they cannot afford Microsoft's compilers and tools (and they don't want the bootleg copies). Anyway, Microsoft Visual XYZ tools might be soon (are already) obsolete, and here is why: With all the Pentium and Opteron microprocessors, it is now possible to make fast-enough software using interpreted languages (Java, Perl, Ruby) that make developers much more productive. When using dynamic languages which are not strongly typed (Lisp, Perl) todays IDEs cannot help much with auto-completing method names because the type of the variable is not known at 'compile' time. Help on method names usually returns several or dozens of responses ('length' is used for Strings, Hashes, Arrays and many other classes).
The IDE tools will have to become much smarter, having global knowledge of the application and tracking flow of objects from creation through all the methods. Or maybe the developers will stick to the decades old technologies of Object Oriented programming (from 1970's).
Posted by laza at January 7, 2004 10:47 PM