Stu's Rusty Bucket

Favourite Ruby Gem

Apress is running a contest for Practical Ruby Gems to talk about your favourite non Rails gem.

I was going to say Instiki but thats really rails in disguise, so the gem I use all day every day is… Rant. Rant is a build system written in ruby using a mini DSL to write build rules.

All my C programming uses Rant for a build system now, it makes my life so much easier. No more recursive makefiles and other whacky stuff that Make forces on you. Rant lets me describe my app in a succint and efficient manor, and when I need to, lets me manipulate the build directly with ruby code.

Specifying your build rules in ruby gives you a very powerfull system to describe how you want things built and lets you dynamically create rules on the fly using symbols. It has simplified my life 10 fold, it makes building C apps so easy, I much prefer it to Rake.

I just cant get across how much it has simplified my build system. Its magic is in its simplicity in its rules and making things work