Ruby 2.0.0p0 IRB warning: "DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle"

I just uninstalled my older versions of Ruby, removed all of my gems (including Rails), and installed Ruby 2.0. In other words, a totally clean re-install. Upon starting IRB, I received this message:

DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle

Note: I'm on a Windows machine.

What does this message mean?

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

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

You may want to comment out the DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle warning at

C:\Ruby200\lib\ruby\2.0.0\dl.rb

since it’s annoying and you are not the irb/pry or some other gems code owner

I got this resolution at openshift.com.

Resolution:

> This error occurs only on Windows machine with Ruby 2.0.0 version. > Until we officially support Ruby 2.0 please downgrade to Ruby 1.9. > > On Windows, you can install Ruby 1.9.3 alongside 2.0. Change your > %PATH% to c:\ruby193\ or whatever directory you installed to prior > to installing the gem.

The message "DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle" is not an error; it's only a warning.
Solution:
You can ignore this in 3 simple steps.
Step 1. Goto C:\RailsInstaller\Ruby2.1.0\lib\ruby\2.1.0
Step 2. Then find dl.rb and open the file with any online editors like Aptana,sublime text etc
Step 3. Comment the line 8 with '#' ie # warn "DL is deprecated, please use Fiddle" .
That's it, Thank you.

I ran into this myself when I wanted to make a thor command under Windows.

To avoid having that message output everytime I ran my thor application I temporarily muted warnings while loading thor:

begin
  original_verbose = $VERBOSE
  $VERBOSE = nil
  require "thor"
ensure
  $VERBOSE = original_verbose
end

That saved me from having to edit third party source files.