DEV Community

Language Installers on Windows Compared : Python, Rust and Ruby

Mahesh K on June 22, 2019

I had some free time today so I decided to check how much community invests in the final product of it's language. So I decided to target three lan...
Collapse
 
kaspermeyer profile image
Kasper Meyer

Thank you for writing about your experience! I agree that it's a big problem that Ruby has such a poor ecosystem on Windows.

I know there's always the good ol' "why don't you just use Linux or MacOS?" excuse, but I think it's a total cop-out. "Please install another operating system" is never going to be a compelling argument if we want to make people interested in the language.

We're alienating so many wonderful beginners and experienced programmers by doing that.

Collapse
 
prahladyeri profile image
Prahlad Yeri

Nice post. I suggest you also try the Java (maven) and the Node (npm) installers on Windows, most likely you won't be disappointed!

And if you get time after that and you have some liking for PHP, you can try that too. In my experience, a bundled XAMPP is far more easier to setup on Windows than creating a WAMP stack from scratch.

Collapse
 
rhymes profile image
rhymes

Python has a long history of support on Windows.

I have a faint recollection of playing with the Win32 API with it 😂 IronPython (Python for .NET) was a thing for a while, a few Python IDEs for Windows had a sizable market share. I myself started programming with Python on Windows.

I might be wrong on this but if memory serves me well, the Python core team had Windows experts in their midst.

All of this to say that it's the result of devs caring enough 😊

Collapse
 
krusenas profile image
Karolis

Ideally you wouldn't even need installer. Just copy paste a compiler to your machine and add it to your PATH.
I guess you are right regarding all the attention going to Linux and macos, people like to develop on similar platforms to where they are going to run the application. When I was working in a bank, we had to write python on windows machines that were quite lock downed and deploy to rhel servers... It's like coding with one hand tied behind your back, never again!:D
Made me always ask potential employers what they standard development environment is :)

Collapse
 
pjulioss profile image
Pedro Júlio

When I started studying ruby I almost gave up because of so much trouble I had on windows until I switched to Linux and it was only joy.

Collapse
 
vyaspranjal33 profile image
Pranjal Vyas

Hey Thanks for writing maheshkay

MSI Installer can be found here for Rust

Gnu variant : static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-1.3...

Msvc Variant : static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-1.3...

Gnu toolschain Rustupinit Exe : static.rust-lang.org/rustup/dist/x...

msvc toolchain Rustupinit Exe : static.rust-lang.org/rustup/dist/x...

Collapse
 
itsjzt profile image
Saurabh Sharma

I like ruby but I never used it seriously just because of bad support on windows. haven't tried rust yet.

Collapse
 
gabgab2003 profile image
DownloadPizza

I'd recommend WSL with ubuntu for ruby

Collapse
 
minkovsky profile image
Filip

The best experience I've had was the Anaconda installer - and its python package repos are amazing. Who knew installing TensorFlow could be painless!

Collapse
 
batbayar profile image
Batbayar Sukhbaatar

Rails installer for windows is good tho. It solves gems and PATH without any manual modification.

Collapse
 
d1p profile image
Debashis Dip

You can also install python 3.7 from the Microsoft store. Just one click to install 👌🏻

Collapse
 
ochiwansa profile image
Choerun Asnawi

Try using Chocolatey (chocolatey.org).

Collapse
 
megatux profile image
Cristian Molina

For Ruby on Windows use rubyinstaller.org/ or WSL