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Ruby

Posted by Yuan Tang
Yuan Tang
14,168 Points

DL is deprecated

when I type irb in the command, it says "DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle". I have had this problem for many times and tried the solutions online but still unable to fix it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

1 Answer

Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points
Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points

that is a common warning when using windows. see this stack overflow post for more info.

from the top answer:

The message you received is common on 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 still require dl.rb so the warning message come out when you require 'irb' ( because irb require 'readline' ) or anything else wants to require 'readline'

You can open with your favorite editor the readline.rb and look up the code ( nearby 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 be said that their purpose is to dynamically link external libraries with Ruby; you can read ruby-doc about DL or Fiddle.