It’s hard to believe the previous episode was less than 24 hours ago. So much has changed.

Last time, I encountered horrifying performance with my Ruby extension, and had two action items:

• Build Ruby from sources so I’d have debug information
• Profile my extension using Intel VTune

I was actually shocked how easy it was to build Ruby from sources. Under windows it’s literally just:

 win32\configure
 nmake
 nmake test
 nmake DESTDIR=foo install

Through diligence and ingenuity, I overcame the DLL Hell problem from the last episode, and am now moving into a new circle of hell.

In the previous episode, I was struggling with the Ruby extension build environment on Windows. I finally gave up and created a Visual C++ 2005 project that built the extension, and wrote a post-build step to copy the files into the Ruby install directory. Obviously this is a short-term hack; I’ll need to get something that will build on *NIX, but I don’t want to spend any more time on the fucking build environment right now.