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Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

As a seasoned ruby developer working on my first ios app in Objective C, I'm intrigued by RubyMotion and would be very interested to hear about the experiences others have had in using it, and whether it's a legitimate, production-ready replacement.

I've resolved to finish my current app in Objective C to be sure that I have a decent grasp of the standard stack before reaching for a higher level abstraction, but it does feel pretty painful at times to slog through some of the language's awkwardness and verbosity after using the likes of ruby, go, and clojure. This isn't to say that Objective C doesn't also have its bright spots, but I tend to feel that they mostly end up getting buried in unwieldy syntax and the bulkiness of xcode.

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I haven't finished any production-ready apps yet, but I can tell you it's a heck of a lot of fun, well worth the $199 so far. It took a little while for me to wrap my head around how to integrate third party libraries, but once I got the right incantation, everything seems to be working as advertised.

The community is also moving very rapidly to replace the Apple's Interface Builder centered UI design process with a DSL approach.

Also, the way Laurent has designed MacRuby and RubyMotion is really brilliant, and I'm happy to be along for the ride and looking forward to see what's coming next.

Have a look at their blog for some success stories:

http://blog.rubymotion.com/

Here is a great RubyMotion tutorial:

http://rubymotion-tutorial.com/

The thing I found about RubyMotion is that the default APIs are just straight mappings to the Objective-C APIs, which eliminates most of the advantages the Ruby language could offer. Your code ends up being an essentially line-by-line copy of what you would write in Objective-C.

I never dove into any of the (meta-)frameworks designed exclusively for RubyMotion, but I do believe there could be some nice advantages to using it there. As much as I do appreciate the Cocoa Touch design, there is always room for improvement.

My position, I've done a fair number of iOS apps and am well versed in Ruby. The meta-programming aspect of RubyMotion is what appealed to me. There's a ton of boilerplate in iOS that could be eliminated. I attempted to migrate an iOS app to RubyMotion. I stopped because the debug tools weren't mature enough. It was a lot of fun to work with when everything worked! Like everything in life I suppose...

I will go back to RubyMotion once it has better debug facilities. And I won't do an app re-write; I'll do a new app. HTH. :D

Objective-C has quite a few metaprogramming capabilities itself, what do you find missing?

Yeah, I've used dynamic method calls in Objective-C and I just Ruby easier to use when doing those types of tasks.

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