Issue #20152 has been updated by byroot (Jean Boussier). Status changed from Open to Closed Closing since https://github.com/ruby/rubygems/pull/8879 solved the problem (but we might need to wait a while before we can really use it as it's not backward compatible). ---------------------------------------- Feature #20152: mkmf / extconf: Add a proper way to not compile the extension https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20152#change-116300 * Author: byroot (Jean Boussier) * Status: Closed ---------------------------------------- ### Context There are various gems that ship with a native extension as a way to speedup part of the gem, but also ship with a pure Ruby version of these methods as a fallback. So they only want to compile the extension if the platform supports it, and if not, just fallback to the slightly slower Ruby version. Right now users rely on one of two hacks to do this. Either they create an empty Makefile, but then still depend on `make` being available, or publish platform specific packages without any extension in them. Examples: - [`bootsnap` skip compilation if not on MRI or TruffleRuby](https://github.com/Shopify/bootsnap/blob/070151f1305f23102365d6b4476a91c02de...) - [`erb` has an extension for MRI but then need to publish a `java` version of the gem that doesn't actually contain Java code, just to skip compilation on JRuby](https://github.com/ruby/erb/issues/52) - [`hiredis-client` skips the compilation for Windows and non-MRI rubies](https://github.com/redis-rb/redis-client/blob/1ab081c1d0e47df5d55e011c9390c7...) ### Feature It would be very useful to have some proper first class API to skip compiling the extension. Something like: ```ruby require "mkmf" if RUBY_ENGINE != "ruby" || RUBY_PLATFORM.match?(/mswin/) skip_compilation else # ... end ``` cc @k0kubun @headius -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/