Publish pre-built gems to avoid native extension compilation

[dbackeus]

gem install itsi takes 1 minute 43 seconds on my M1 MacBook Pro. This makes it the slowest installing gem I've ever seen and would make me think twice about using it since it would impact all developers dev machines as well as slow down CI/CD pipelines.

It has become pretty fairlry common for gems with native extensions to provide pre-built gems for the common linux / macos environments to avoid wasting time on compilation. Eg. nokogiri, fii, google-protobuf etc.

Perhaps this could even bypass the need to have cargo etc installed on the host machine?

[wouterken]

Hey @dbackeus
Yes, it's a great idea, and just unfortunately something I haven't yet had time to play with (as naturally it makes the gem publishing experience a bit more slow and involved, and in these very early development stages of Itsi, minor versions can still change fairly quickly).

rb-sys appears to support this use-case out of the box, so I'm optimistic this will significantly help install speeds once incorporated.