man.. why does everything is so slow on developing on windows?
It's not. Check your machine and rails configuration. Development
environment will always be slower than production or other environment
that caches models.
Given enough hardware I'm sure that a Windows development machine will
fly but there is an issue of getting gems to work. We had a developer
here who started out with Windows and had no end of trouble getting
some gems to work. He finally jacked it in and got a Mac and stopped
swearing so much.
In my team we have macs and windows. I develop on windows, and have no
problems whatsoever. It took me a while to get my environment set up
since unfortunately there are fewer windows guides out there, but it is
doable, enjoyable and highly productive.
There are very few gems that are nix specific and won't work on windows.
Passenger and Unicorn come to mind. You can always find alternatives
(thin server). A few things here and there might require additional
configuration but you get the hang of it with time.
Frankly i'm a bit annoyed at Nix/Mac users pretending that development
on the Mac is so much better. It isn't. Developing on windows is just as
easy and productive. If anything, it's better because you can have a
proper custom PC setup, full open source software availability, and a
whole bunch of freedoms possible under windows and not under Mac.
I wasn't trying to start a "fight", I just wanted clarification of your
vague but sweeping statements. To help anyone trying to make
their own decision
man… why does everything is so slow on developing on windows?
It’s not. Check your machine and rails configuration. Development
environment will always be slower than production or other environment
that caches models.
There some history here - ruby 1.8 was significantly slower on windows than on unix like platforms, and ruby 1.9.2 also had windows specific performance regressions (see The Great Ruby Shootout (July 2010) | Programming Zen for example)… Patch 125 of Ruby 1.9.3 had some windows specific performance fixes (IO related I think) that supposedly fixed a lot of that (I’m not a windows user) so it’s definitely worth upgrading to that if you’re running an older version.
There are very few gems that are nix specific and won’t work on windows.
Passenger and Unicorn come to mind. You can always find alternatives
(thin server). A few things here and there might require additional
configuration but you get the hang of it with time.
Frankly i’m a bit annoyed at Nix/Mac users pretending that development
on the Mac is so much better. It isn’t. Developing on windows is just as
easy and productive. If anything, it’s better because you can have a
proper custom PC setup, full open source software availability, and a
whole bunch of freedoms possible under windows and not under Mac.
Again, I think there is a lot of history here. It used to be that to build any gem with native extensions on windows (when using the 1 click ruby installer) you needed a paid for version of Visual studio (It even had to be a specific version I think). A tremendous amount of work (by Luis Lavena among others) has gone into improving this, but many of us remember the not so distant old days where you had to just hope that someone had build a binary package of the gem. Part of it is being slightly off the beaten path - eg capybara-webkit or poltegeist don’t support windows (or at least not officially) and it’s not because of a fundamental reason they couldn’t but because the core developers of those gems don’t use windows - windows support probably won’t happen unless someone else helps them out.
jruby is a good option too.
Not sure what these freedoms are though (especially compare to Linux)
