[MacRuby-devel] Towards a compile option for macgem

[Mark Rada]

Hey,

I recently wrote a small plugin for rubygems that will use the MacRuby compiler to compile *.rb files when you install a gem.

It is usable, but very simple right now; I would like to make it more powerful in a few different ways and I'm not sure which would be good. Things I think I could do (I have not looked at the rubygems source code in depth yet, so I'm not sure what I am allowed to do using the proper API):

- A gemspec property (e.g. spec.compile_for_macruby = true)
- A gem command:
	gem compile nokogiri
	gem compile —remove-original-files nokogiri
		• I can’t remove the original *.rb files and leave *.rbo files by default because of how rubygems identifies gems (unless I modify gemspec files)
- A gem install option
	gem install —compile nokogiri

I’m not sure which is best, perhaps all of them will get implemented, but I was wondering what the communities thoughts were about compiling gems; especially since the gemspec option won't work if the community never uses it.

The repo is located at https://github.com/ferrous26/rubygems-compile

--
Mark Rada
mrada at marketcircle.com