MacRuby

After 3 months of development, here comes the second release of MacRuby, 0.2! Check it out while it’s hot! This is an important release which addresses many bugs but also re-implements parts of the runtime using the CoreFoundation framework. In ... [More] MacRuby 0.2, all strings, arrays and hashes are now native Cocoa types, represented by NSString, NSArray and NSDictionary objects, respectively. The entire String, Array and Hash interface was rewritten on top of the Cocoa equivalents using the powerful CoreFoundation framework. The previous implementation, inherited from MRI, is not used anymore. The rationale behind this change is simple: It is no longer necessary to convert Ruby primitive types to Cocoa or vice-versa. For example, a String created in MacRuby can be passed as is, without conversion, to an underlying C or Objective-C API that expects an NSString. Similarly, any method of the Ruby String class can be performed on an NSString that comes from Objective-C. Interestingly, the CoreFoundation implementation that MacRuby now uses has proven itself to be stable and performs quite well, even this early in the implementation process. We did not work on any performance improvements for MacRuby 0.2 (we will address performance in the next upcoming release), but we noticed some dramatic performance gains in some areas nonetheless. Inserting elements in an array is faster in MacRuby than the original 1.9 implementation, for example, mostly because CFArray switches on the fly its data structure to an implementation that performs well according to the current number of elements. <pre class="commands"> a=[]; 100_000.times { |i| a.insert(0, i) } MacRuby version 0.2 (ruby 1.9.0 2008-06-03) [universal-darwin9.0] 0.326057 0.318714 0.314731 ruby 1.9.0 (2008-06-03 revision 16762) [i686-darwin9.0.0] 4.308484 4.382623 4.36368 ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0] 4.608796 4.595334 4.581045 </pre> Regarding hashes, searching for a specific value (which isn’t something that is typically done) is shown to be faster. <pre class="commands"> h = Hash[*(1..10000).to_a]; 10000.times { |i| h.has_value?(i) } MacRuby version 0.2 (ruby 1.9.0 2008-06-03) [universal-darwin9.0] 0.965304 0.955293 0.950316 ruby 1.9.0 (2008-06-03 revision 16762) [i686-darwin9.0.0] 3.790461 3.804271 3.815217 ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0] 4.225632 4.225457 4.239244 </pre> And to finish with strings, it turns out that manipulations on multi-byte strings are faster in MacRuby than 1.9. <pre class="commands"> $ cat t3.rb -- coding: utf-8 -- s = “わたしはロランです。” * 2000 s.length.times { |i| s[i] } $ ruby b.rb t3.rb MacRuby version 0.2 (ruby 1.9.0 2008-06-03) [universal-darwin9.0] 0.180019 0.180165 0.177425 ruby 1.9.0 (2008-06-03 revision 16762) [i686-darwin9.0.0] 1.624943 1.633502 1.62767 Speaking of strings, since every of them is now a CFString, they get for free features that weren’t present in the original 1.9 implementation, such as ICU transformations for example: <pre class="commands"> $ cat t3.rb puts "watashiha".transform('Latin-Hiragana') "lauren".transform('Latin-Katakana') "desu.".transform('Latin-Hiragana') $ macruby -v t3.rb MacRuby version 0.2 (ruby 1.9.0 2008-05-17) [universal-darwin9.0] わたしはラウレンです。 </pre> MacRuby is still slower in many cases, including very important ones such as objects allocation and methods dispatch. There are also too many areas in String, Array and Hash where we perform much less well than we should. We plan to address this in the next release (0.3) as well as many other things, so stay tuned! [Less]

Very recently some new projects using RubyCocoa were released to the public. TimeToTicket, a tool to report your working hours in the RedMine project management system. CocoaNav, an application to elegantly browse frameworks and classes. Very cool ... [More] animations. osx_trash, a command-line tool to easily manipulate the Mac OS X Finder's trash. And, it's hard to not mention GitNub, a desktop frontend to the git source control management system. This isn't really a new project, but it's starting to be popular in the development community. This really demonstrates that RubyCocoa is being adopted by more people, and more importantly, Ruby as a language to write Mac OS X applications. And the future is not that far now! [Less]

Very recently some new projects using RubyCocoa were released to the public. TimeToTicket, a tool to report your working hours in the RedMine project management system. CocoaNav, an application to elegantly browse frameworks and classes. Very cool ... [More] animations. osx_trash, a command-line tool to easily manipulate the Mac OS X Finder’s trash. And, it’s hard to not mention GitNub, a desktop frontend to the git source control management system. This isn’t really a new project, but it’s starting to be popular in the development community. This really demonstrates that RubyCocoa is being adopted by more people, and more importantly, Ruby as a language to write Mac OS X applications. And the future is not that far now! [Less]

Very recently some new projects using RubyCocoa were released to the public. TimeToTicket, a tool to report your working hours in the RedMine project management system. CocoaNav, an application to elegantly browse frameworks and classes. Very cool ... [More] animations. osx_trash, a command-line tool to easily manipulate the Mac OS X Finder’s trash. And, it’s hard to not mention GitNub, a desktop frontend to the git source control management system. This isn’t really a new project, but it’s starting to be popular in the development community. This really demonstrates that RubyCocoa is being adopted by more people, and more importantly, Ruby as a language to write Mac OS X applications. And the future is not that far now! [Less]

Eric Smith just posted a very nice tutorial that introduces test-driven development using RubyCocoa and the Leopard development tools, which now support Ruby. Thanks Eric!

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. ... [More] 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! [Less]

MacRuby, a version of Ruby that runs on top of Objective-C, has just been announced. This is a new project from Apple, still experimental, and a first release is expected very soon. You can learn more about the project by visiting the MacRuby homepage. Enjoy!

The second software update for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, named 10.5.2, has just been released. RubyGems has been updated to 1.0.1, and RubyCocoa to 0.13.1, which are both respectively the latest versions available. A problem was fixed in the Ruby ... [More] rbconfig.rb’s LDSHARED variable, which didn’t include “-undefined dynamic_lookup”, and caused some 3rd party libraries like RubyInline to fail. Note that RubyInline shipped a fix quite early. Enjoy, and report bugs as usual! [Less]

Peter Cooper compiled a very nice list of various RubyCocoa resources. Thanks a lot Peter!

A security update is now available for both Tiger and Leopard, which fixes Ruby vulnerabilities. Check out the release notes for more information about the vulnerabilities that were fixed. In Leopard, Ruby was updated to 1.8.6 p111 and Rails to 1.2.6.