How good is the new Ruby Installer for Windows?
I asked before about why Ruby was so slow on windows and now I've seen some impressive benchmarks showing marked speed improvements with the minGW compilation used in the new installers and am curious how it has worked for people who have tried it?
How many gems are broken for this version? Any big ones you have been bit by not on this list?
It's quite a bit faster, the exact experience varying according to your application. For low-volume Rails stuff, for example, I think you would probably not notice much: database access doesn't really change, for example.
Easiest thing is to try it. If you save your ruby\bin and ruby\lib directories first, you can install over your existing Ruby and be able to switch between the two. I think only those two directories are affected - it seems to work for me at least.
Once you have an installed mingw32 instance, start with the gem installs. The ones that have compiled components will hopefully already have mingw32 versions. Failing that, you could try modifying with the mswin32 versions from your "old" lib - I haven't done this myself and have only the vaguest memory of reading something that suggested it may work...
At the bare minimum, the mingw32 binaries run fine. If you start installing some esoteric gems, you might get some install failures. I highly recommend using Ruby on Linux or Mac, everything works better on those platforms. You will actually be spending time writing Ruby code instead of yak shaving your way to get gems to configure and build properly. I am writing this based on installing Ruby 1.9.1 mingw bins. The 1.8 version might be more stable. The msvc Ruby 1.9.1 binaries have their own separate set of issues, mostly run time ones.
I've played with it a fair bit. It's definitely faster, both because of the new YARV VM in 1.9.1, and the use of a C compiler created sometime this century.
Pure Ruby gems are pretty reliable, obviously. Getting mswin32 binaries to work is a hit/miss situation (mostly miss IMHO), and native mingw32 binaries are still the exception, not the rule.
I wanted FXRuby on Windows, and went through the following to get it: Getting FXRuby Going with Ruby 1.9.1 and the new RubyInstaller
So it depends what gems you care about and how handy you are with build scripts and such. Despite the heroic efforts of Louis Lavena and the Ruby Installer contributors, Ruby on Windows remains a second-class citizen.
As you've already noticed, the RubyInstaller guys maintain a list of gems known to work, or not, but this is pretty fluid. The mailing list is usually pretty responsive to questions as well.