Ruby Distribution

[Jonathan Faulkenberry]

Hi all,
I am a C programmer that is beginning to see the network capaibilities
of Ruby. I am interested in creating a chat application that uses Ruby.
I am a little confused with the distribution of Ruby, though. Is Ruby
strictly scripting? Or can I distribute binaries? The time may come when
I may not want peopel to see my code and simply distribute binaries.
Also, the user may not have Ruby installed and bundling Ruby with the
software would bulk it up a lot. If anyone could help me understand how
Ruby works in terms of distribution/binaries it would be greatly
appreciated.

Jonathan

 

[James Britt]

Hi all,
I am a C programmer that is beginning to see the network capaibilities
of Ruby. I am interested in creating a chat application that uses Ruby.
I am a little confused with the distribution of Ruby, though. Is Ruby
strictly scripting? Or can I distribute binaries? The time may come when
I may not want peopel to see my code and simply distribute binaries.
Also, the user may not have Ruby installed and bundling Ruby with the
software would bulk it up a lot. If anyone could help me understand how
Ruby works in terms of distribution/binaries it would be greatly
appreciated.

This topic comes up regularly, so search the archives for more details.

The short answer is that Ruby is text, and the source for a Ruby app may
be obfuscated, but it is still available for human eyes.

However, Ruby integrates well with C, so you may be able to hide the
naughty bits by recoding them in C and calling the compiled libs from
your Ruby code.

Poke around for ruby2c as well.

Also look around for rubyscript2exe for bundling the Ruby interpreter
with your code.

James

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