
MacRuby 0.6 Official Release - sant0sk1
http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/04/30/macruby06.html
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rauljara
"In this release, we believe that MacRuby is now stable enough to consider
using it to develop Cocoa applications."

"This release also passes about 85% of RubySpecs..."

Those two things seemed a little contradictory to me at first. But then I
noticed the part about macruby apps being able to compile to machine code, so
I guess what they mean is that if your app is stable in macruby, it will be
stable when you ship it, even macruby isn't fully compatible with ruby yet.

Definitely looking forward to playing around with it.

~~~
jdminhbg
Ruby the language is pretty gigantic, so there are a lot of hard-to-fix corner
cases. IronRuby, IIRC, passes 85% or so and just hit 1.0 and can run Rails. So
most Ruby you write will run on this, but it is possible to break it.

~~~
knowtheory
well... just because 85% of Ruby runs, doesn't mean that 85% of your usecases
are covered. Unfortunately for me, a variety of rubygems that my apps and libs
depend on break with 0.6, even things as lightweight as Addressable.

Still lookin' forward to more macruby though :)

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tlrobinson
I'm still waiting for the MacRuby/GCD Rack-compatible webserver they mentioned
awhile ago, supposedly called "ControlTower".

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mattetti
It's available in the svn repo.

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jballanc
True, but you probably want to wait for the official announcement. There's a
decent amount of churn at the moment...

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mark_l_watson
Nice, I am curious how it will benchmark against Ruby 1.9.1 for some of my
libraries. Anyone run any benchmarks yet on their code?

~~~
mark_l_watson
I am dissapointed: tried running it on a utility I wrote for crunching
Wikipedia text (lots of string operations, some file IO) and it is so much
slower than Ruby 1.9.1. I stopped the benchmark after 5 minutes (same test
took about 70 seconds with Ruby 1.9.1). Then I tried a simple string
manipulation benchmark, and it ran about 3 times slower in MacRuby.

Using Cocoa classes in MacRuby is great for Mac development but (apparently)
really slows down string operations.

~~~
cscotta
As I understand it, the focus up 'til now has been correctness and
compatibility rather than performance / efficiency. It seems a bit early to
jump on them for that (though the speed hit you mention is surprising). That
said, I'd expect things to pick up speed once the next-generation compiler
Laurent mentions in the blog post is ready (and when the RubySpec needle moves
closer to 100).

Regardless, the team has made a ton of progress since the last release. Here's
looking forward to the next.

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Zev
There has been work on performance; in a lot of cases, MacRuby _is_ faster
than YARV. Just, not in this case, with strings. Thats mostly because strings
were just redone to use NSString's internally, so there hasn't been as much
work done on them as there has in other parts.

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hackermom
Does anyone know how this differs from the Ruby that is a native part of OS X
10.6? Is it just a newer version?

    
    
      MomBook:~ hackermom$ ruby -v
      ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-08 patchlevel 173) [universal-darwin10.0]

~~~
wrs
It uses the Objective-C runtime, including "native" objects (strings are
NSStrings, hashes are NSDictionaries, etc.). It generates native code (using
LLVM) rather than interpreting. It has a more sensible syntax for making
Objective-C method calls. (And more.)

~~~
Zev
Also might be worth noting: MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9, not
1.8.x. Any benchmarks done should be compared against YARV, not what comes
with OS X.

