Why MacRuby Matters

ZeroGravitas · on Sept 28, 2009

I was unaware of the ahead of time compilation stuff, anyone got a more expansive link on that topic?

edit, found one: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2009-Jul...

Off-topic: anyone else sick of slideshare? Why exactly do they need flash to show a series of images (most of which have images of text)?

_tggb · on Sept 28, 2009

I would recommend downloading the .key (Keynote) file from Slideshare and viewing it on your own, if possible. The slide notes are useful, more of the presenter's ideas shared (via http://twitter.com/importantshock/status/4430454006).

I initially thought that was the reason why it was in flash; so slide notes would be visible somehow. Thats not the case though.

boucher · on Sept 28, 2009

The notes are visible on slideshare. Click on the "Notes on slide X" tab.

_tggb · on Sept 28, 2009

Didn't see that, thanks for pointing it out.

xiaoma · on Sept 28, 2009

Yes. I loathe slide share. Slide share presentations are usually information light. Worse, it presents what should fit on a single page with a couple of flicks of the mouse scroll wheel at most in a hideously inconvenient format. In this case it required literally over a hundred clicks just to get a teaser. Truth be told, I got sick of clicking around click #87 or so and just abandoned it.

Thanks for the link!

martingordon · on Sept 28, 2009

The main issue I have with anything that's not Objective-C is the lack of documentation. For example, how do I know I can do things like this (from slide 76) without having to deal with an entirely new set of documentation?

gradient(:start => (:name => "grey"), :end => (:name => "blue))

While I do agree that Objective-C has many, many drawbacks, the fact that Cocoa was designed with ObjC in mind, makes me stick with it rather than trying to work Cocoa in another language.

cubicle67 · on Sept 28, 2009

The example you've given is of Hot Cocoa which is a series of nice wrappers around common Cocoa UI operations

The direct mapping from Obj-C to MacRuby is quite simple. Here's an example from some code I'm working on at the moment

  TPShot *newShot= [[TPShot alloc] initInWorld:world
                                    atPosition:shotPos
                                        facing:facingAngle];

becomes

  new_shot= TPShot.initInWorld world, 
                    atPosition:shotPos, 
                        facing:facingAngle

boucher · on Sept 28, 2009

MacRuby is a pretty interesting project. I'm not a huge ruby fan, but it definitely does have some syntactic advantages over Objective-C.

Objective-J is walking a similar line, and thanks to its JavaScript base it has many of the same things MacRuby brings to the environment. MacRuby probably has better immediate performance potential, but Objective-J has more flexibility in future language design decisions.

It's a good time for those of us interested in Cocoa and its related projects.

brentbb · on Sept 28, 2009

Just saw this at C4, good preso! I haven't learned ObjC yet, but I can grok Ruby.