

MacRuby 0.8 Released - ddagradi
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2010-December/006594.html

======
ddagradi
Notable fixes - for my current project at least - include:

\- no longer crashing when calling the main thread from a background thread

\- supporting formal protocols (or at least pretending to enough to work
right)

\- properly changing the path of the library when you embed it in the
executable, for distributing via an App Store

MacRuby has been a fantastic tool in developing for the Mac App Store with a
team of programmers with a mixed knowledge of Cocoa and Objective-C. Super
exciting to see it progressing so quickly!

------
petercooper
Naturally, Laurent is more authoritative but I wrote this up for Ruby Inside
earlier - it might be more accessible to ppl not familiar with MacRuby and
includes notes on two MacRuby books that are in the works:
[http://www.rubyinside.com/macruby-0-8-released-
and-2-macruby...](http://www.rubyinside.com/macruby-0-8-released-
and-2-macruby-books-on-the-way-4053.html)

~~~
ddagradi
It's great to see multiple books on the horizon. Matt's book was really a
great reference when getting started.

I didn't notice that Hubcap was a MacRuby project! I'm looking forward to
hearing about the challenges they faced in development. It seems like in the
near future there will be a pretty great library of Mac software written in
MacRuby...

------
jbrennan
I wonder if this will ever be used as an alternative to Objective-C for iOS.

~~~
chc
There has been some research to that end. The main hurdle there is that
MacRuby depends on the Cocoa garbage collector, which is intentionally not
supported on iOS. For iOS, they would need to either find another garbage
collector that works well with MacRuby and somehow magically Does The Right
Thing with all the SDK classes, or else teach the MacRuby compiler to insert
retains and autoreleases where needed.

~~~
jballanc
The garbage collector isn't the only issue. Compiled Obj-C code does not
retain sufficient metadata (i.e. variadic methods, enums, and such) to do
certain "ruby"-ish things. Currently, this is resolved using BridgeSupport,
which is also not currently available on iOS...

~~~
chc
MacRuby's Clang-based version of BridgeSupport should already be most of the
way to solving this problem. (I haven't tested, but I can't see why that would
not be the case.)

~~~
jballanc
The Clang-based BridgeSupport preview only improves the metadata generation.
There's still no way to package the metadata that is iPhone friendly.
Ultimately, a likely solution will be to add the metadata to an extra __TEXT
segment and use dlopen/dlsym to fetch it from the MacRuby runtime...

------
ddagradi
The official blog post is up:
<http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/12/13/macruby08.html>

------
kentosi
Does anyone know of any apps written in this?

~~~
ddagradi
A quick Github search turned up these:
<http://isaac.kearse.co.nz/2010/01/01/birdwatch/>
<http://isaac.kearse.co.nz/2010/01/31/stopwatch/>
<https://github.com/sstephenson/37signalsMenu>
<https://github.com/ashchan/gmail-notifr>

Hubcap will be when it's released
([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1487030260/hubcap-a-
gith...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1487030260/hubcap-a-github-
client-for-mac-os-x))

Hackety Hack (<http://hacketyhack.heroku.com/>) was talking about a version
for the Mac App Store using MacRuby

Our current app will be open-sourced on Github soon...

