I have been looking into the Ruby language for awhile now.....reading lots of information on its capabilities and whatnot. I bought the Programming Ruby book as well to look into it some more. What blurs the lines is information on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

I'm just wondering if Ruby has the capability to create PROGRAMS in the sense that say that I want to develop a multimedia program like a music player, Can Ruby build a music player that doesn't require installations of ruby to be on the existing system? I know pretty much all *nix systems have ruby installed by default, but I don't like the sound of developing a music player that acts like a script and requires an existing installation of Ruby on said system.

I know it can call and access native APIs on the platforms it's available on but can such a program be done with Ruby? I'm really into multimedia and I see myself developing multimedia applications.

I just don't understand the capabilities of Ruby and what should this tool be used for?

linux maybe, Unix definitely not.

Hi,

I too have recently been looking into Ruby. From what I have discovered, it is purely a scripting language and as such requires the Ruby intpreter to actually run. It does not produce binary executables like compiled and linked languages do. Your application would require whatever runtime engines are used for the interpretation to work. If Ruby is installed on pretty much all *nix systems, then you should be okay on that front. This of course means that the versions of Ruby that are already installed on those machines are compatible with your applications. It also means that your application will not run on most Winblows machines without requireing Ruby to be installed by the end-user.

Ciao!

In truth the only things you are likely find on most real live production unix machines
are perl and java.

Perhaps you're looking for something like RubyScript2Exe? It also seems like it might be possible to convert Ruby to C code, which can of course then be compiled into a binary.

Ruby is a very portable language, though somewhat young in acceptance, but its performance is terrible (for the moment at least). I think if multimedia is your thing, sticking to C or C++, which are much more commonly used in this area, would be a better idea.

[Note: if you take the second method of converting Ruby code to C, you presumably get the best of both worlds -- the performance of C and the flexibility of Ruby. If it works.]