RubyScript2Exe 0.5.1 review

RubyScript2Exe transforms your Ruby script into a standalone, compressed Windows, Linux or Mac OS X (Darwin) executable. You can l

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Erik Veenstra

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RubyScript2Exe transforms your Ruby script into a standalone, compressed Windows, Linux or Mac OS X (Darwin) executable.

You can look at it as a "compiler". Not in the sense of a source-code-to-byte-code compiler, but as a "collector", for it collects all necessary files to run your script on an other machine: the Ruby script, the Ruby interpreter and the Ruby runtime library (stripped down for this script). Anyway, the result is the same: a standalone executable (application.exe). And that's what we want!

Because of the gathering of files from your own Ruby installation, RubyScript2Exe creates an executable for the platform it's being run on. No cross compile.

And when I say Windows, I mean both Windows (RubyInstaller, MinGW and MSWin32) and Cygwin. But the generated exe under Cygwin is very, very big, because its exe's are very big (static?) and it includes cygwin1.dll, so it can run on machines without Cygwin.

There is one more advantage: Because there might be some incompatibilities between the different Ruby versions, you have to test your script with every single version. Unless you distribute your version of Ruby with your script...

If you like RubyScript2Exe, you might want to read Distributing Ruby Applications. It's about how I build, pack and distribute my Ruby applications. Theory and practice.