Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

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I would love nothing more than writing Mac or iOS apps in Ruby, but Apple's commitment to MacRuby isn't all that great.

A quick look at commit stats for MacRuby shows that there's really just one full-time Apple person working on MacRuby, 3 others that contribute occasionally and a few non-apple people.

I call that "barely committed" or "hedging your bets". For some perspective, Sun sponsored more people to work on JRuby at some point, more people worked on Rubinius at some point etc.

Sorry for tempering the enthusiasm with hard, cold facts.

  kjkmacpro:macruby kkowalczyk$ git log | awk '/Author:/ {print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
     1 emoy@apple.com
     6 watson1978@gmail.com
     8 joshua.ballanco@apple.com
    16 ben@tanjero.com
    21 psychs@limechat.net
    23 neeracher@apple.com
    96 mattaimonetti@gmail.com
   138 martinlagardette@apple.com
   162 vincent.isambart@gmail.com
   185 rich@infoether.com
   211 pthomson@apple.com
   227 ernest.prabhakar@gmail.com
   542 eloy.de.enige@gmail.com
  2377 lsansonetti@apple.com

That is true. But Lauren Sansonetti has really done a lot of work: he is the main developer and every now and then he would merge his own branch which is full of the kind of features and improvement that take a while to develop and cannot be merged easily until a late stage.

So I would say that Apple is by far the main developer of MacRuby.

That said you are right that one full-time developer doesn't look like much of a commitment from Apple. And I think that was the case. My feelings (and of course these are very subjective) was that Apple supported MacRuby partially as a way to help Ruby on Mac and partially as a research experiment.

I hope at some point Apple decides to really put its fiches on Ruby: that would be awesome. But MacRuby on iOS is very much the kind of thing Samsonetti loves, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's all his doing, and nobody else's within Apple.

One last note: Apple also supports LLVM on top of which MacRuby is based... so not sure how many people that would correspond to in your: commitment ~ sponsored people equation. :)

Assuming that Apple is doing all of their MacRuby development around this 3rd party hosted, public git server, and that Apple doesn't have version control facilities on their own private network.

There is only one branch on that server, do you seriously suggest that is representative of all the development work ongoing internally at Apple and that one can infer "commitment" from what Apple has made public at this point?

I'm not saying that Apple is or isn't heavily committed to Ruby, I do say that it is unsafe to conclude that they are not from the limited information provided.

Actually, the source is hosted at git://git.macruby.org/macruby which is owned by Apple.

So yes, unless you provide the evidence to support your claims, I'll assume that all MacRuby work is being done in public on macruby.org, similar to how other Apple open-source project work (llvm, WebKit, clang) and that the amount of that work is representative of Apple's commitment to the project.

In comparison, if you do similar stats on other Apple projects (like llvm, WebKit) you'll see that they have order of magnitude more people working on them, producing order of magnitude more code.

There is one branch one the repo: master. There are no feature branches whatsoever. What kind of workflow for mainline development is that?

There are also no commits referencing iOS at all, despite Laurent saying that Apple have been working on an iOS port. Assuming Apple is working iOS compatibility, one might assume that they are targeting a future major iOS release, e.g. iOS 5.0. That is something that Apple categorically would not do in public for obvious reasons.

Laurent's commits are too few and far between lately for someone purported to be on MacRuby full time, to me they just look like cherry pick commits that fix serious bugs.

Like I've said before I am not saying what Apple is or isn't doing. You may be right, but what you have said is hardly compelling evidence. Apple is hardly going to carry out development in public on something that inadvertently reveals features or implementation details of of their golden geese products, i.e. iOS devices.

Laurent doesn't use Git. The main repo for MacRuby is the SVN @ MacOS Forge (hosted by Apple), and has branches: http://www.macruby.org/trac/browser/MacRuby/branches

Also, if there is no commit referring to iOS, it's mainly because iOS is a very secretive project. You don't know what he actually worked on. You don't know if maybe he has local / internal (aka @ apple) changes concerning iOS.

Plus if Laurent's commits are too "few and far lately" as you said, it's probably because he either have other Apple related stuff to do, or simply because he doesn't want to add new features (yet) that might break before he releases 0.7: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2010-Aug...

> Laurent saying that Apple have been working on an iOS port

Actually, Laurent hinted that the MacRuby team might be working on it. He in no way announced anything regarding Apple.

Laurent tends to work on new features on his own branch, often experimenting new ideas, and once it "stands on its own" it merges it for everyone to improve/change it together with him.

offtopic: you can also use 'git shortlog -s -n --no-merges'

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