Fucking ruby

_posts/2011-12-26-how-is-ruby-built.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: How is Ruby built?
+tags:
+- ruby
+- wtf
+- opinion
+---
+
+**Note:** This is a rant, I'm not actually going to explain anything of use
+
+----
+
+For a rather long time, I've used [clang](http://clang.llvm.org/) on my Linux
+machine as the default value of the `$CC` environment variable. I've simply
+found it to be a faster and more friendly compiler to work with than the
+default `gcc`.
+
+
+When I first came to Ruby, I tried building Ruby 1.8.7 with clang and it failed
+*utterly*. After bitching on Twitter, as I'm prone to doing, [Joe
+Damato](http://timetobleed.com) pointed out that Ruby 1.8 isn't really valid
+C. Instead it is a hodge podge of macros, C code, assembly and tears.
+
+I later found out that Ruby 1.9 seems to cope with being built with `clang`
+properly, so I built a couple of [1.9 variants with
+RVM](https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/) for my personal projects.
+
+
+Everything was all fine and good until [I tried building a native extension for
+a 1.9 Ruby:](https://gist.github.com/1521970A)
+
+    make
+    compiling em.cpp
+    cc1plus: warning: command line option ‘-Wdeclaration-after-statement’ is valid for C/ObjC but not for C++ [enabled by default]
+    cc1plus: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-Wshorten-64-to-32’
+    cc1plus: warning: command line option ‘-Wimplicit-function-declaration’ is valid for C/ObjC but not for C++ [enabled by default]
+    make: *** [em.o] Error 1
+
+I lost **hours** trying to figure out what the hell was going on here. I was
+convinced for hours that EventMachine (the gem being built here) had a bug in
+it. Then I was convinced that RVM had a bug in it, but I finally landed on
+Ruby's build system itself.
+
+
+I should point out that the warning `shorten-64-to-32` only exists in patched
+versions of compilers shipped with Mac OS X. It *certainly* doesn't exist on
+any compiler on Linux, so where the hell did this flag come from?
+
+Somehow, and arriving at this "somehow" took me a number of miserable hours,
+the difference between using `clang(1)` and `gcc(1)` to build Ruby resulted in
+a single nonsense `CXXFLAGS` value which didn't come back to bite me until I
+tried to build a native extension.
+
+
+How the shit does Ruby get built!?