

MacRuby and the Mac App Store - thibaut_barrere
http://www.rubyinside.com/macruby-and-the-mac-app-store-3922.html

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alexyoung
"Given all of this, I think that if you want to develop OS X apps without
moving away from Ruby..."

I've written a lot of both Ruby and Objective-C/Cocoa over the last few years,
and as much as I enjoy working with Objective-C Ruby really would save a lot
of effort. It's not like I have a problem "moving away" from Ruby, but I'd
like the option to sell apps made with it through their service.

If Apple ships MacRuby pre-installed in Lion, with Xcode integration and
documentation, I think it would be huge.

~~~
rdouble
Hopefully Apple does include MacRuby pre-installed.

I just wrapped up a MacRuby app. MacRuby is a very cool system. However, if
you are distributing the app, you either have to include all of MacRuby, or go
through a complicated and error-prone process of excluding portions of the
stdlib. This is a black art at the moment.

Even without most of the stdlib, the bundled app is much larger than the
equivalent Cocoa app.

The larger app size could become a concern on machines like the Air with
smaller SSDs. It also seems tasteless to have multiple apps each with their
own MacRuby distro bundled up with the app. A pre-installed MacRuby would
solve both of these problems. Then again, it would also make creating Mac apps
almost too easy... how will I compete?

~~~
oomkiller
What kind of package size are we talking here? I see MacRuby is 30MB, surely
the whole thing isnot required.

~~~
rdouble
Yes, the whole thing is required. In fact, my app is 34MB, the majority of
which is MacRuby + the stdlib.

I cobbled together a process using information found on a number of blog posts
and mailing list archives which let me exclude the parts of the stdlib I
wasn't using. This got the file size down to 14MB. However, I don't have any
QA resources so I'm not sure if this has introduced any instability in the
app.

In contrast, the pure Cocoa version of this app is 4.5MB.

~~~
maercsrats
I think the newer version of macruby, with greater bridgesupport, should help
this out: [http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/10/08/bridgesupport-
preview...](http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/10/08/bridgesupport-preview.html)

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steveklabnik
I intend to get Hackety Hack 1.0 in there, for sure.

