I just uninstalled my older versions of Ruby, removed all of my gems (including Rails), and installed Ruby 2.0. In other words, a totally clean re-install. Upon starting IRB, I received this message:
DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle
Note: I'm on a Windows machine.
What does this message mean?
The message you received is common when you have ruby 2.0.0p0 (2013-02-24)
on top of Windows.
The message "DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle
" is not an error; it's only a warning.
The source is the Deprecation notice for DL introduced some time ago in dl.rb
( see revisions/37910 ).
On Windows the lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.0.0/readline.rb
file still requires dl.rb
so the warning message comes out when you require 'irb'
( because irb requires 'readline'
) or when anything else wants to require 'readline'
.
You can open readline.rb
with your favorite text editor and look up the code ( near line 4369 ):
if RUBY_VERSION < '1.9.1'
require 'Win32API'
else
require 'dl'
class Win32API
DLL = {}
We can always hope for an improvement to work out this deprecation in future releases of Ruby.
EDIT: For those wanting to go deeper about Fiddle vs DL, let it be said that their purpose is to dynamically link external libraries with Ruby; you can read on the ruby-doc website about DL or Fiddle.