MacRuby 0.5 beta 2 is out.

This is great to see. MacRuby is accomplishing important work very quickly.

Here are the highlights from the latest Status Report from 0.5, posted by Laurent on Monday at http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2009-Nov...

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Enjoy! The final 0.5 release is not far at this point :-)

Highlights:

- rdoc, ri, rack, sinatra are now working.

- DTrace probes are available. Same as in MacRuby 0.4.

- BigDecimal, OpenSSL and JSON support (experimental).

- macrubyc: support for building fat binaries (using the --arch argument).

- New tool: macruby_deploy, to help you deploying a MacRuby application, by ahead-of-time compiling its source code and relocating the MacRuby framework inside the application bundle. One-click Xcode targets provided.

- Lots of bugs fixed, especially related to compatibility, thread-safeness and memory/resource leaks.

Although I do all of my deployments on Linux, so MacRuby is not so useful to me, I still think that this is an exciting project: LVM compiler technology, potential for good runtime performance compared to other Ruby implementations, and a really nice interface for writing native Mac applications.

If I had to write a Mac app, MacRuby and HotCocoa look great.

Feels like I just tried getting beta 1 working yesterday. Oh yeah, that was yesterday. This would be a lot easier to do if LLVM decided to play nice. Update: Just installed,and worked like a charm! Kudos, guys!

How far off is support for native iPhone apps written in Ruby? Is this on the roadmap?