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Comment by shimonamit | Hacker News Reader

Speculative, but could this be an early preventative measure to keep JRuby from challenging their up and coming MacRuby platform?

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That strikes me as spectacularly unlikely. JRuby and MacRuby aren't in competition; they meet different needs and have very different usage scenarios.

There's no challenge or threat. Ruby interpreters are not a There-Can-Be-Only-One Highlander scenario. You more or less have to be trying to imagine the most wildly cartoonish and improbably malicious motives to think otherwise.

I don't believe that this is an attempt on Apple's part to hate on JRuby.

I am however very curious about what impact this will have on the development of JRuby and other JVM-based languages, such as Clojure and Scala. It's no secret that a lot of folks in the (J)Ruby community work on Macs, but I think that bleeds over into the other languages' communities as well. For example, I'm pretty sure Rich Hickey uses a Mac, and a tweet from Michael Fogus earlier today suggests that he does as well. Not sure about the Scala folks, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that they're Macheads too.

We'll have to see how this plays out. It's been very nice that Java's already available on all new Macs, but then there's been the dreadfully slow progress of incorporating updates, security fixes, and so on. On the other hand, OpenJDK has been building well on OS X for some time in both 32 and 64-bit forms. The only real missing pieces are easy ways to get OpenJDK builds installed (helped by Apple's restructuring of how they configure and locate Java installs) and the Cocoa-based backend for Swing (if you're using or building GUIs).

In any case, there's lots of vectors to getting JDK/JRE on OS X, and this might actually make it easier to choose which vendor and version you want for your OS X Java install.

That wouldn't make very much sense to me, given that Ruby 1.8.7 is a much more formidable "challenger" than JRuby will ever be.

"Their" up and coming MacRuby platform? Is that a joke?

Might I say, "the up and coming MacRuby platform Apple has designs for"? At least a couple of the committers are Apple employees. But I misattributed the project as being "theirs", which apparently isn't true.

Eh, it's Apple's in any meaningful way. The project is led by Apple's Laurent Sansonetti, hosted by Apple's Mac OS Forge, and Sansonetti has said that MacRuby is intended to replace RubyCocoa, which is currently bundled with Mac OS X. MacRuby also recently started making improvements to Apple's BridgeSupport framework. I don't know how much more an open-source project like MacRuby could do to deserve to be called "Apple's."

From the contact page:

MacRuby is a free software project by Apple Inc. Many folks inside and outside of Apple contribute to this great project and we have a MacRuby Project Team page to list them. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, ideas or bugs to report.

In what respect? MacRuby is a project hosted by Apple. It's lead developer is an Apple employee, and there are several other Apple employees working on the project. In what significant way is it not Apple's platform?

Nope.

No.

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