
Interest: Senior engineer confirms Apple working on MacRuby for iOS - pietrofmaggi
https://twitter.com/applespotlight/status/24302410536
======
sjtgraham
I just have a gut feeling that Ruby will be a significant language for iOS/OS
X development going forward. I really hope so anyway, even in its present
state MacRuby is _insanely_ fast against any other Ruby implementation. With
the the resources of Apple behind it, the Ruby VM ecosystem will benefit
greatly from thing like AOT MacRuby is bringing into the game.

I've looked on with envy at how Node.js is getting such a boost by leveraging
a component of a heavily developed consumer product. Node.js gets such
incredible performance for free because of the JS VM arms race. If Ruby has
the weight of a giant behind it, hopefully it will experience a similar wave.
IMO Ruby is a lot better suited to async programming than JS, as it has fibers
for example, making it easy to untangle the nested, continuation passing style
of async code.

Ruby is such a beautiful, productive language, it really deserves a giant like
Apple throwing their weight behind it.

~~~
jamesbritt
"If Ruby has the weight of a giant behind it, hopefully it will experience a
similar wave."

I take it you didn't consider Sun a giant?

~~~
sjtgraham
Sun was all about Java and I think it's disingenuous to say that Sun ever
threw any significant effort into JRuby further than seeing JRuby as a way to
assimilate Ruby into the Java Borg.

~~~
jamesbritt
I have no idea what Sun's motivations were (and I doubt you do, either), but
all the time I've been using JRuby I never got the sense there was anything
going on that was designed to hook people into Java other than using the JVM.

There was no more assimilation going on than what I would expect to see from
Apple and MacRuby. Less, perhaps, since JRuby apps run on multiple platforms,
something MacRuby apps won't do.

And since JRuby itself was nothing more than a jar, developers could slip it
into their usual Java environment without having to explain how or why they
were installing Ruby.

I've sat in JUG meetings watching JRuby explained to Java fans, and each time
they crowd goes from notable skepticism to smiles and head-nodding when they
see what they can do.

Sun's support of Charlie, Tom, et al really helped get JRuby up to speed
making it not only the fastest complete Ruby implementation but also
acceptable to "the enterprise".

Sun may have been all about Java, but to the extent they helped JRuby they've
enabled many Java devs to be all about Ruby.

------
kjksf
I would love nothing more than writing Mac or iOS apps in Ruby, but Apple's
commitment to MacRuby isn't all that great.

A quick look at commit stats for MacRuby shows that there's really just one
full-time Apple person working on MacRuby, 3 others that contribute
occasionally and a few non-apple people.

I call that "barely committed" or "hedging your bets". For some perspective,
Sun sponsored more people to work on JRuby at some point, more people worked
on Rubinius at some point etc.

Sorry for tempering the enthusiasm with hard, cold facts.

    
    
      kjkmacpro:macruby kkowalczyk$ git log | awk '/Author:/ {print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
         1 emoy@apple.com
         6 watson1978@gmail.com
         8 joshua.ballanco@apple.com
        16 ben@tanjero.com
        21 psychs@limechat.net
        23 neeracher@apple.com
        96 mattaimonetti@gmail.com
       138 martinlagardette@apple.com
       162 vincent.isambart@gmail.com
       185 rich@infoether.com
       211 pthomson@apple.com
       227 ernest.prabhakar@gmail.com
       542 eloy.de.enige@gmail.com
      2377 lsansonetti@apple.com

~~~
sjtgraham
Assuming that Apple is doing all of their MacRuby development around this 3rd
party hosted, public git server, and that Apple doesn't have version control
facilities on their own private network.

There is only one branch on that server, do you seriously suggest that is
representative of all the development work ongoing internally at Apple and
that one can infer "commitment" from what Apple has made public at this point?

I'm not saying that Apple is or isn't heavily committed to Ruby, I do say that
it is unsafe to conclude that they are not from the limited information
provided.

~~~
kjksf
Actually, the source is hosted at git://git.macruby.org/macruby which is owned
by Apple.

So yes, unless you provide the evidence to support your claims, I'll assume
that all MacRuby work is being done in public on macruby.org, similar to how
other Apple open-source project work (llvm, WebKit, clang) and that the amount
of that work is representative of Apple's commitment to the project.

In comparison, if you do similar stats on other Apple projects (like llvm,
WebKit) you'll see that they have order of magnitude more people working on
them, producing order of magnitude more code.

~~~
sjtgraham
There is one branch one the repo: master. There are no feature branches
whatsoever. What kind of workflow for mainline development is that?

There are also no commits referencing iOS at all, despite Laurent saying that
Apple have been working on an iOS port. Assuming Apple is working iOS
compatibility, one might assume that they are targeting a future major iOS
release, e.g. iOS 5.0. That is something that Apple categorically would not do
in public for obvious reasons.

Laurent's commits are too few and far between lately for someone purported to
be on MacRuby full time, to me they just look like cherry pick commits that
fix serious bugs.

Like I've said before I am not saying what Apple is or isn't doing. You may be
right, but what you have said is hardly compelling evidence. Apple is hardly
going to carry out development in public on something that inadvertently
reveals features or implementation details of of their golden geese products,
i.e. iOS devices.

~~~
naixn
Laurent doesn't use Git. The main repo for MacRuby is the SVN @ MacOS Forge
(hosted by Apple), and has branches:
<http://www.macruby.org/trac/browser/MacRuby/branches>

Also, if there is no commit referring to iOS, it's mainly because iOS is a
very secretive project. You don't know what he actually worked on. You don't
know if maybe he has local / internal (aka @ apple) changes concerning iOS.

Plus if Laurent's commits are too "few and far lately" as you said, it's
probably because he either have other Apple related stuff to do, or simply
because he doesn't want to add new features (yet) that might break before he
releases 0.7: [http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-
devel/2010-Aug...](http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-
devel/2010-August/005944.html)

------
audionerd

      > Do the recent changes mean we can use MacRuby to write iPhone apps?
    
      Well, iOS is not supported by MacRuby, yet. Be patient, we work on it :)
      Laurent
    

via: [http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-
devel/2010-Sep...](http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-
devel/2010-September/005991.html)

------
smoody
Shouldn't the headline read something more like "Senior engineer confirms _he_
is woking on MacRuby for iOS" -- didn't seem to me that he is implying that it
is an official Apple project. reply

~~~
naixn
From <http://www.macruby.org> :

> "MacRuby is a free software project by Apple Inc. Sources are available
> under the Ruby license."

~~~
runjake
But it's really more a sponsored project, not a project in the same sense as
WebKit. It's more of a "sure, work on it and see where it goes" thing.

~~~
naixn
I'm not sure I agree. It was started by an Apple employee, endorsed by Apple,
90% of all commits is done by Apple employees, and is hosted on Mac OS Forge
(<http://www.macosforge.org/>), where Apple releases its open-source projects
(Webkit, launchd, libdispatch, etc.)

------
pietrofmaggi
bits and pieces from the tubes: <http://iflipbits.com/post/1101983568/macruby-
soon-on-ios>

MacRuby seems more and more a first class citizen of the iWorld.

------
Kilimanjaro
I rather use Javascript and the Nitro engine (like google's V8) and explode
the iOS ecosystem ten-fold of what objective-C has done already.

Palm is already betting on JS, google too, so it is just a matter of time when
the mobile world uses a flavor of JS for apps.

~~~
kjksf
Technically (i.e. ignoring Apple's recently lifted ban on non-objective-c
languages) that has been possible for a long time.

See <http://inexdo.com/JSCocoa> and
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327200/jscocoa-and-the-
ip...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327200/jscocoa-and-the-iphone)

I'm a Mac developer and I have to tell you that writing Cocoa apps in
JavaScript is not great because JavaScript is not a great language. I would
much prefer Ruby, Python or C# syntax than JavaScript syntax.

It's also a reason why JSCoca hasn't taken off despite being available for
almost 2 years now and why MacRuby is such a promising, although not yet
production quality, project.

Nitpicking: Palm didn't bet on JS but on HTML stack (of which JS is a part,
but not the whole).

~~~
sreque
Unfortunately, your opinion isn't very popular around here. People here don't
seem to want to accept the fact that javascript was never designed to be a
scalable general purpose language for writing large applications. It has
slowly evolved over time, but is still not there.

I hope something like Google'ss NaCL becomes popular, and instead of
javascript slowly creeping to the server/desktop/phone because we have no
choice in browser-land, the browser opens itself up to all computer languages
so javascript can start feeling some competition. I even think this would be
good for javascript, as it would spur the language to evolve faster.

------
aufreak3
More than just MacRUby is to come I think.

After Apple recently retracted their limitations on languages and runtimes,
I'm actually drooling over the possibility of a slew of dev env apps for
various languages including Squeak, SuperCollider and visual languages like
Scratch. Making interactive stuff on the iPad with the power of a full
programming language behind will be super fun.

------
jasonlotito
The original tweet: <http://mobile.twitter.com/lrz/status/24137640579>

Copy and pasted on an iPad.

------
smerickson
This would be seriously awesome! I love the cocoa frameworks, but I can't
stand objective c. being able to use ruby would be a dream come true.

