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Thanks for the props. Unfortunately I didn't have time anymore to maintain Traveling Ruby. Until Traveling Ruby aligns better with profitable business cases, I won't have time to work on it.

enclode.io/ruby-packer seems very interesting. They use a very different approach. I wouldn't call it "better" because it has both pros and cons compared to Traveling Ruby. This also relates to your doubts about whether Traveling Ruby's approach to native extensions is sustainable or not.

ruby-packer supplies a patched Ruby. It compiles that Ruby (along with native extensions) locally, and packs it into a squashfs archive. Ruby is patched to look inside the squashfs as well on the real filesystem.

Pros: single file, works with all native extensions.

Cons: you need access to all platforms for which you want to distribute (no cross-packaging support), Ruby must be patched and maintaining patches is very labor-intensive.

For Traveling Ruby, I simply made a different set of tradeoffs. I valued cross-packaging support. I wanted to be able to package for Mac, Linux and Windows while only using a Mac (or only using Linux, or only using Windows), instead of setting up build environments for all 3. This is especially important for Windows support: requiring packagers to setup a Windows system with a proper compilation toolchain is a huge pain. Until we have better cross-compilation tooling in general that works on all 3 platforms, using precompiled native extensions is the only way to make things work.