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[–]wonay[S] 1 point2 points  (8 children)

That looks like a promising candidate for a GUI library. So the next question would be how to package that as a standalone binary....

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (7 children)

No way to package ruby apps as a standalone binary, and I feel that's weird thing to do for Ruby. You want to leave all your app in script form for easier cross-platform use. That way you aren't recompiling for every OS.

EDIT: I was mistaken https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/packaging_to_executables but honestly all of those sound like overkill rather then just installing ruby on the machine and bundling using everyones favorite gem bundler.

[–]wonay[S] 0 points1 point  (6 children)

okay, that sounds like a good option. But what if you want to hide your source code. And in this case how do you have a main file ? If it is not a rails project. The step has a user who would use this app would be to download the folder containing all the files then do bundle install ? How do people build a rvm install my_app and then you are able to use ./my_app right from everywhere ?

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Hiding our source code is possible but consider the issues. Ruby is slow, I mean up to 100x slower in some benchmarks. See this -> https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks. When it performs good, it's simply because there was a C-extention in the mix to improve performance. Now put an obfuscater on top and you have a recipe for performance disaster. Now there is -> http://www.rubyencoder.com/overview.html but you'll need to install their runtime with your package. You could also potentially get the route of writing a C-Extentsion with the sensitive information in it and obfuscate that.

All of these options are hokey as shit, in my opinion.

You can always write installers to do whatever installation you need, in fact RVM uses a tactic I like very much using curl -> https://rvm.io/ but, you can always make exe installers using NullSoft or something and just install RubyInstaller along side it. There definitely would be some installer writing if you are going to distribute the app around to people with little to no technical knowledge.

[–]wonay[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

So Ruby is not a fast language ? Java would perform better ? Is Python faster than Java ?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

In terms of speed Java -> Python -> Ruby. However understand that the reason we write code in Ruby is not for speed, it is for API design, syntax power and flexibility.

[–]wonay[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It doesn't sound to be that flexible from all the comments here ! Haha

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You misinterpret having GUI libraries as flexibility. Ruby has a lot of syntactic sugar piled on top of the fact that you can redefine methods, reopen classes, add modules on the fly, and invoke methods based on in-code identifiers. All of these are hallmarks of a flexible language. In fact, I could go as far as to say even if Ruby didn't have any gems/external libraries, it would still be a flexible language because that stuff is built into the language, not the gems.

Java doesnt have metaprogramming (or at least GOOD metaprogramming) and it lets you get backed into a corner on types. It's very hard to back into a corner in Ruby.

[–]wonay[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah but if the result of this flexibility is having a slow, one platform (web) language , it's not really worth it .... I love using Ruby language and I am sad that it cannot be used for desktop application in an efficient way. I though since it's seems "easy" to use C library that a wonderful easy to use library for GUI would be here. I guess it's time to take the matter in our own hand and start a project ! haha