Introducing Live for RubyMotion | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Live for RubyMotion

irrationalfab.github.com

52 pointsirrationalfab12 comments

We had something similar quite a while ago at Naughty Dog, when working on the Jak and Daxter PS2 games. Our development environment was Emacs, and as well as having a REPL console in one of the buffers, you could position your cursor inside any function/method, hit CTRL/T, and have just that function compiled and updated on the target hardware, on the fly, with no restart required.

Iterative programming is especially suited for game development, where you want to rapidly experiment with tweaking parameters and behaviors without waiting for a full compile/link/download/restart.

Was this using GOAL? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

Yep. GOAL was built from the ground up to support hot relinking, as well as a number of other nice features. Very cool for the time.

This is really cool!

I wonder if people are working on autocomplete packages for different IDEs/editors to help make RubyMotion smoother with those long method names (didn't see much googling it). IMO in combination with this, autocompletion would make RubyMotion a tremendously compelling option for iOS development.

I sure hope so. TextMate bundles seem the logical choice since Rubyists seem to love TM, and I do, too. That said, I'd switch IDEs if the library was good enough. I actively acknowledge I am taking advantage of Xcode's CodeSense when it comes to some of Apple's asininely long enums (UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator for instance).

Have you guys seen this? Textmate bundle for auto-completion. https://github.com/libin/RubyMotion.tmbundle

The build, check, tweak, rebuild is certainly the most time consuming part of any iOS development. This is a really great enhancement.

If you use unit tests and Interface Builder, that time should largely disappear.

It doesn't if you use alot of custom views and animations.

Bret Victor's reach never stops amazing me.

Another step in the right direction!

this is insanely cool!

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