> Constant gem compilation issues, I spent hours resolving them.
While this is common, it doesn't really have anything to do with Rails itself. I can't think of any Rails dependencies that have mandatory native extensions off the top of my head.
If you want SQLite, there's that. Not mandatory, but pretty useful. Fortunately there are the jdbc-sqlite3 and activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter gems for Jruby.
While this is common, it doesn't really have anything to do with Rails itself. I can't think of any Rails dependencies that have mandatory native extensions off the top of my head.