MacRuby 0.9 is released | Hacker News Reader

MacRuby 0.9 is released

macruby.org

70 pointssteveklabnik18 comments

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Release notes: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2011-Feb...

Looks like lots of bug fixes and strong focus on stability.

A few resources for learning MacRuby:

* http://peepcode.com/products/meet-macruby

* http://www.manning.com/lim/

* http://www.macruby.org/documentation/tutorial.html

I hope MacRuby finds its way into Lion. I used it a few revisions ago and it was quite solid.

I doubt it will be included. It does not need to be included. You can build a self contained .app using macruby_deploy.

There's been persistent rumors that MacRuby will replace Objective-C as the Blessed Holy Language of Apple.

I do not see those rumors coming to fruition at all. Apple has way too much invested in ObjC at this point to be supplanted by Ruby. That's just my opinion though.

They're based in a few things:

1) MacRuby supports LLVM.

2) Apple has a dev on the MacRuby project.

3) MacRuby's Cocoa bindings are pretty fantastic, it's not unimaginable that they could be replaced with just MacRuby.

4) Ruby and Apple are already a cultural fit.

That said, I'd be a bit of a surprise. Doesn't mean it'll never happen, though.

I wonder if Apple might be tempted to throw significant support behind Ruby just because Google is pushing Python.

This doesn't make much sense to be honest. Just because two companies don't see eye to eye on an executive level and are competing on some products doesn't mean they will take a flamewar over languages and make business decisions based on that. That's nonsense.

You might be interested to know that Apple has released products built on top of python, such as the calendar server (which is open source, and built on top of Twisted). How would that possibly fit into your theory? Or what of the python objective c bridge? Both python and ruby come preinstalled on OS X, I don't think Apple as a company has a preference for one or the other.

It wasn't a theory, it was just a passing thought. In any case, I wasn't positing a "flamewar"; rather, wondering if there might be some strategic value in pushing a different language that exists in the same sort of space as Python than the one that Google is pushing.

I'm just going to point out a single flaw in this argument.

2) Apple has _a_ dev on the MacRuby project.

One dev does not a complete project make. Perhaps in time, if they put more support behind MacRuby, but I'll believe it when I see it. So far, people are just chasing rumours.

Haha, that's ridiculous. I've never heard such rumors but if I had they would be up there with 2Pac releasing a new album.

It is highly likely that 2pac will have another album out (that guy works hard!)

There is very little chance of this happening, although I hope I'm wrong.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I think there's a good chance that MacRuby could perhaps ship with XCode and become a first class, officially supported option for OS X development. And unlike, say, the Java-Cocoa bridge, MacRuby may in time become a desirable option for some developers and some types of projects.

Bundling the framework makes the .app pretty huge. My simple app with embedded MacRuby and a few embedded gems weighs in at 54MB.

It would be awesome to have Macruby already present on users' machines.

The default deployment settings will indeed generate a pretty big application, but it is possible to trim out unnecessary stuff (such as the standard library or extensions). Also, we are hopefully dropping i386 support in 0.10, therefore the MacRuby binaries will be 2 times smaller.

From one presumably in the know, that would lend (to a suspicious individual like myself) credence to the theory that.. a future version of the OS will definitely be 64-bit by default. 2 times smaller? I wish I had the math chops to compute/debate that, but it seems like an even more substantial gain than dropping PPC code in SnowLeo did(plus binary/compression optimizations).

A bright future, thanks for all your dedication and hard work!

Is there any headway on MacRuby on iOS since September? http://iflipbits.com/post/1101983568/macruby-soon-on-ios

complete release notes:

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2011-Feb...

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