Installing libv8 and therubyracer on Mavericks

Question

I'm about to tear my hair out with trying to get therubyracer gem to install on Mavericks 10.9 - any help would be immensely appreciated.

I understand that there's a host of other questions about this subject, but literally none of the following (including various combinations and hopeful retrials which have consumed 2+ days at this point) have solved any issue

1. Uninstalling libv8 and install therubyracer
2. Using brew install libv8 instead
3. Installing apple-gcc or similar
4. Installing various versions of Xcode and Developer Tools
5. Reinstalling rvm and re-building ruby 1.9.3

The latest I've been able to achieve is to get this error message:

> gem install therubyracer
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing therubyracer:
  ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    /Users/aqua/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p545/bin/ruby -r ./siteconf20150127-54061-10i2fna.rb extconf.rb
checking for main() in -lpthread... yes
checking for main() in -lobjc... yes
creating Makefile

make  clean

make
compiling accessor.cc
g++-4.6: error: unrecognized option '-rdynamic'
make: *** [accessor.o] Error 1

make failed, exit code 2

Gem files will remain installed in /Users/aqua/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p545/gems/therubyracer-0.12.1 for inspection.
Results logged to /Users/aqua/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p545/extensions/x86_64-darwin-13/1.9.1/therubyracer-0.12.1/gem_make.out

There doesn't seem to be much information around g++-4.6: error: unrecognized option '-rdynamic' . My first guess was maybe that gcc46 does not support this flag.

Based on other post suggestions I tried installing apple-gcc42 :

brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install apple-gcc42

And executed it again with the proper enviornment context variables to point it to the new apple-gcc42 installation:

> $ CC=/usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/gcc-4.2 CPP=/usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/cpp-4.2 CXX=/usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/g++-4.2 gem install therubyracer

Still no luck, and it was oddly still throwing the same error about gcc46 , which makes me thing that it's not picking up apple-gcc42 at all

I even tried symlinking the correct versions (backing up the originals of course)

cd /usr/bin

mv gcc gcc_backup
mv g++ g++_backup
mv cpp cpp_backup

sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/gcc-4.2 /usr/bin/gcc
sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/g++-4.2 /usr/bin/g++
sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/cpp-4.2 /usr/bin/cpp

Absolutely no luck, still throwing g++-4.6: error: unrecognized option '-rdynamic'

So.. How do you force the gem install to use a specific compiler version? Is that even the right approach?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

I also faced the same problem. Followed the same steps you have described above. Below are the additional exports I did to install therubyracer.

export CC=/usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/gcc-4.2
export CXX=/usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/g++-4.2
export CPP=/usr/local/Cellar/apple-gcc42/4.2.1-5666.3/bin/cpp-4.2

I did not do brew install libv8

Next, uninstalled libv8 gem

gem uninstall libv8

Finally installed therubyracer

gem install therubyracer -v='0.12.2'

I am using ruby 2.2.2, hope this helps.