Is there an easy way to enable Tk for Ruby in OS X v10.6+?

Question

Starting with Snow Leopard (OS X v10.6) Apple bundles 64-bit ruby by default. Unfortunately, there is no 64-bit Tk bundled, so the following ruby code will fail:

require 'tk'

Is it some easy way to enable Tk for Ruby in Snow Leopard and higher? Like installing 32-bit ruby or whatever. I have tried to recompile Ruby with Tk support but it seems not that easy - tutorials found in google refers to some options in Ruby's ./configure script that don't exists in actual Rby code downloaded from official site :(. I will be glad for any hints - i have a Ruby app with Tk GUI and need to enable my users to use it :)

Answer 1

Tk builds fine in 64-bit mode on OSX, but only if you've got sources from the 8.6 series^{«ZIP»«TGZ»} (still in beta for various reasons, but quite usable). You'll want to ensure you configure with --enable-aqua --enable-64bit of course, but I assume that's pretty much obvious.

(Alas, I can't say how to then integrate the build of Tk with your Ruby installation, though there is some documentation online that seems to be somewhat relevant. I emphasize that I've only googled for it though; on this I don't speak from experience.)