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MacRuby 0.1

I am pleased to announce the first release of MacRuby, 0.1.

MacRuby is a version of Ruby that runs on top of Objective-C. More precisely, MacRuby is currently a port of the Ruby 1.9 implementation for the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector.

So far, since the project beginning was announced a few weeks ago, many bugs were fixed and features added. MacRuby is still at this point experimental, although if it’s also usable.

The purpose of this version is to release functional code, and also to let you test the new user experience. Please note that the project implementation will change deeply in the next releases.

You can learn more about the project on its homepage, and download a binary installer.

Enjoy!

Having access to the full potential of ObjectiveC by using Ruby (in the same fashion that one can use .NET through IronRuby) would be something of amazing and might draw a lot of attention back to Cocoa and application development on Mac OS X.


2 Responses to “MacRuby 0.1”

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  1. Alcides Fonseca
    Published at April 18th, 2008 at 9:06 am

    So from what I got, this is different from using CRuby with the ObjC bindings (like you do with Python and PyObjC). This is a real implementation of Ruby in Objective-C).

    So what are the advantages of this versus the standard Ruby Cocoa apps? Is is performance?

  2. mlopes
    Published at April 18th, 2008 at 9:43 am

    It probably doesn’t perform as good as pure Objective C but it’s way nicer to code in Ruby than in Objective C, IMHO.

    Compared to CRuby with ObjC bindings, it depends on how the interpreter is coded and devised but it’s probably faster as it generates Objective C code in the same fashion that Java generates byte code or .NET generates managed code.