What to do about failed native extension builds in gem on Windows?

A couple of Rails applications I downloaded have dependencies on bson_ext which appears to be a native code library. When I run rake gems:install for the app I get the following error message:

ERROR:  Error installing bson_ext:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

d:/Ruby187/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
checking for asprintf()... no
checking for ruby/st.h... no
checking for st.h... no
checking for ruby开发者_开发问答/regex.h... no
checking for regex.h... no
checking for ruby/encoding.h... no
creating Makefile

make
'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.


Gem files will remain installed in d:/Ruby187/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/bson_ext-1.0.1 for inspection.
Results logged to d:/Ruby187/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/bson_ext-1.0.1/ext/cbson/gem_make.out

My questions are:

1. Will my rails application fail because of this, I think I know the answer to this?

2. If I need to build this gem can I do it on windows?

3. If it can be built on Windows what toolchain do I need? GCC?

4. Should I just abandon Windows for Rails development and use my Mac or a Linux VM instead?

Try using RubyInstaller and the optional DevKit. With the DevKit installed you should be able to build (compile) most native extensions on windows.

1. Yes, this application won't start if one of the gems it depends on isn't installed. A gem that includes a native extension can't be installed unless the extension is compiled properly.
2. Well, windows isn't the most supported OS in the ruby world :) but I think chances are you'll be able to.
3. You'll need a C compiler and other tools like make. In most cases installing Visual Studio or Visual C++ is enough.
4. This is highly recommended for any kind of more-or-less serious development. You are likely to encounter some nasty issues on windows. I myself have become as happy a developer as one could be since I've switched to mac :)

Have you tried running Ruby from Cygwin?