Patching and recompiling has moderate-low cost of initial creation, but also moderate-low setup overhead per user.
Plus, some of us think this kind of thing is just plain fun. :)
I built this because I like working on this sort of thing and because it lowers the bar for everyone else who doesn't know how to or want to rebuild their binaries.
Also, depends a lot on your infrastructure. Sometimes it's easier to distribute and maintain patched Rubies, and sometimes it's easier to just require a ruby gem. The gem is designed and built in such a way that it should be resistant to most changes made to the Ruby VM.
And I agree, it's fun stuff! That kind of hacking really makes me smile. I was just curious about the pragmatic motivations.
"Because you want to do it to a running production app" seems far-fetched to me -- not saying that it is, I had just discounted that reasoning.
tbrownaw's point of 'high initial cost, low marginal cost' makes a good amount of sense, though.
Yes, it sounds masochistic to me, too.
I really like Ruby as a language, but the ecosystem is just not up to snuff, which is why I've gone back to Python. The docs are complete, the standard implementation is rock solid and only getting better (cf. unladen-swallow), and I can interface with C stuff easily (cf. Cython). I'm looking forward to Ruby maturing.
(By the way, don't waste time with the Python C interface. Use ctypes. Ruby calls it Ruby/DL or "ffi".)
God bless crazy hackers, I live vicariously through your insanity.
