Swings and roundabouts. Personally, I use Ruby for stand-alone apps more than for Rails. I do command line tools and Mac apps using RubyCocoa. I can't guaran

Swings and roundabouts. Personally, I use Ruby for stand-alone apps more than for Rails. I do command line tools and Mac apps using RubyCocoa. I can't guarantee that my product functions as planned if I can't control what code it uses. For libs which belong to the core OS, I am comfortable with using shared libs. These libs are very well documented, and the interfaces don't move. Any changes made by the OS vendor are generally for fixing bugs. For everything else, I have no guarantee, and hence little trust, that the developer isn't going to change their lib in a way that breaks my code. In such a case, I much prefer to take control over that lib by bringing it into my own project as a static lib. I give my app it's own auto-updating feature, and I take responsibility for keeping the static libs up to date. That takes care of potential security issues.