Building Native Extensions. This Could Take A While...
summary
Covers the concrete how and why of shipping native Ruby extensions: use mkmf and extconf.rb to compile, use miniporie or bundled tarballs to build upstream libs, and use rake-compiler-dock to cross‑compile and publish pre-compiled gems. Claims: precompiled installs drop from ~13–45s to under 1s, Nokogiri sees ~60 million precompiled downloads, and support issues fall from ~1/week to ~1/month. Also documents tradeoffs (security updates, musl vs glibc, lost platform optimizations) and recommends MFA and gem signing for supply‑chain trust.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:08What is a C Extension
- 3:06Isolated
- 4:22Extconf
- 7:22Common Problems
- 9:02Third Party Libraries
- 10:49External Library
- 11:10System Strategy
- 13:07System Strategy Issues
- 14:39Package Up Libraries
- 16:36Security Updates
- 17:18Installation Time
- 18:07Nokigiri 111
- 22:49System Libraries
- 23:50Goodbye Fat Gems
- 26:57Trust
- 29:04Upcoming
