What inquiring minds want to know about Ruby in order to compare it to Perl (and really, these things in my mind set Perl apart from a LOT of other potential programming languages): does it work as well on Windows as it does on Linux and many Unix systems? Does it also then have a cross-platform GUI toolkit?

One of the things that absolutely thrills me about Perl is the fact that with the exception of some fancy process management issues and certain filesystem specific things, a HUGE quantity of code is truly cross-platform-- especially nice when considering the Tk module. I realize that Tk probably hasn't been ported nearly as many places as Perl itself, but it is nice to have most x86 systems being able to pick up a client and work with it. And Linux capable PPC too.

Not that I'm trying to hammer on Ruby, just curious. Especially since I gather it has a "cleaner" OO model, which could be quite valuable in the realm of GUI scripting (especially if you want to get into compound widgets and stuff).

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