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Comment by dcurtis | Hacker News Reader

I have an honest question: Why does anyone want Ruby to run on Windows? The cost of switching to Ubuntu and running Ruby there is probably way, way cheaper than rewriting all the libraries to work on Windows.

I don't understand why this is even an issue.

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You know, not to flame, but this attitude is exactly why Ruby isn't where it could be.

I love Ruby, do most of my work in it now and haven't owned a Windows machine since 2001, but if Ruby's answer to Windows users is "just switch to Ubuntu" it's not surprising they decide to just choose another language.

Because for ruby, asking a developer to convert not only to your language, but his whole platform as well is going to seriously hinder your adoption rates.

Not caring about adoption rates is another story altogether.

Many developers have no choice but to use windows thanks to corporate policy ... I am not saying that is a good thing, but its the way it is (at least where I work). I resorted to doing Rails dev using Emacs + Putty, which was easier than developing the app on windows!

I want to write actual executable client software for home users, rather than servers. Specifically, I want to write a game. I want to do it in Ruby. However, all the "home users" that will play it, use Windows.

Can't you develop it on *nix and run it on the JRE via JRuby?

Even better, run andLinux inside of Windows

I can't give up Photoshop for the type of work I do and I can't afford a macbook yet so I just installed andLinux and have all of the abilities of Rails and Linux while still using Windows. All you really need for Rails is the command line, I use Intype in Windows for my editor and I am cruising. andLinux only uses about 100mb of a RAM at any given time so it's barely noticeable when it's running in the background.

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