July 2008 - MacRuby-devel - lists.macosforge.org

MacRuby... suitable for my project?
by Greg Willits 31 Jul '08

31 Jul '08

I have a data aggregation project. It's fairly sizable; wants to use several GB of RAM (easily consuming 16GB or more during processing). Additionally, it would benefit from using multiple cpu cores. I'm wondering if MacRuby as it stands now could overcome some limitations with MRI, and hoping this is the right place to ask whether MacRuby makes sense for the project... Relative to the RAM, I'm working on some techniques to make the whole thing work in a smaller footprint, but there's some drawbacks. There's enough machines involved here that paying for programming is a viable alternative to just paying for lots of RAM. One of the problems I have with the MRI is rather slow performance when reconstituting serialized data. I was hoping I could pre-process a bunch of data, serialize it, store to disk, and recall it as needed. One example is 11MB of text data that I load and reorganize into an array of hashes (45,000 rows, about 20 fields). Marshaled to disk that's about 11Mb of data as well. It takes several seconds (depending on platform) to rebuild that. Also reloading that, MRI consumes vastly more RAM than just the 11MB. I'm wondering if MacRuby would perform any better? That file is one of hundreds ranging from 1MB to 120MB (with 20-30MB being average) that would be loaded during processing, and many of them need to be resident in RAM at the same time along with the WIP data structures. In a perfect world, I would like to have one large read-only data pool in RAM, and multiple "tasks" (we'll be generic for now) reading that data to assemble it's own new data set for output that does not need to be shared among tasks. A final process would stitch the results together. I either need something that will handle VM efficienctly so I can pretend I have "unlimited" RAM, or something that will perform better if I manually manage Marshaling. And I need something that does OS native threads well. I'm about 1/2 way done with the plain Ruby version of the code in 1.8.6. Haven't tried 1.9 yet, so I know I would have to start with that. I'm wondering if using MacRuby, and creating a very simple Cocoa app that functions more or less as VM container for the Ruby code would provide: a) better general performance (one would assume so) b) better performance relative to garbage collection, VM paging, etc c) access to better multi-threaded capabilities -- ability for multiple threads to use common read-only data pool in RAM and build their own data sets. Personally, I'm not a Cocoa dev (yet... it's on my list), but I have access to one, and of course would go ahead and learn what is needed in order to do this. I know this isn't really a main stream application for what MacRuby is wanting to acheive, but does it "make sense" to use MacRuby in this way to agin access to performance capabilities not in MRI ? Essentially a MacOS specific replacement for JRuby. Thoughts? Many thanks for your time. -- greg willits

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Installation of the MacRuby XCode Template?
by Gegenfurtner Harald 28 Jul '08

28 Jul '08

Hello there, after installing MacRuby 0.2, I didn't find the MacRuby project templates in XCode 3.1, New Project. Then I realized that XCode 3.1 is installing / expecting its project templates in the /Developer/Library instead of the System or Home libraries. Did I do something wrong during the (binary) installation, or is this a change from XCode 3.0 to 3.1? Moving the MacRuby template to the developer library fixed the problem, though. If the use of the /Developer/Library is new to XCode 3.1, please update the installer accordingly. I am a complete beginner with MacRuby programming, so please excuse me if this may sound stupid to you. Thanks for your great work! Kind regards, Harald Gegenfurtner Wedel near Hamburg, Germany

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Re: [MacRuby-devel] [macruby] #46: Interface Builder unable to parse new keyed arguments, fails to load class files
by macruby 28 Jul '08

28 Jul '08

#46: Interface Builder unable to parse new keyed arguments, fails to load class files --------------------------------+------------------------------------------- Reporter: apparently(a)fake.ru | Owner: lsansonetti(a)apple.com Type: defect | Status: new Priority: blocker | Milestone: MacRuby 0.3 Component: MacRuby | Resolution: Keywords: | --------------------------------+------------------------------------------- Comment (by jakub.suder(a)gmail.com) I think IB also doesn't recognize classes that inherit (implicitly) from Object instead of NSObject (and if I understand correctly, inheriting from NSObject causes some other problems and is not recommended in MacRuby). -- Ticket URL: <https://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/46#comment:4> macruby <http://macruby.org/>

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array arguments
by James Reynolds 28 Jul '08

28 Jul '08

Hi all, I'm a bit confused about how MacRuby handles array arguments. In RubyCocoa I could do this: cgcolor = CGColorCreate(colorspace,[1.0,1.0,1.0,1.0]) But the same thing in MacRuby gives me this error: ArgumentError: can't convert Ruby object `[1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0]' to Objective-C value of type `^f' Thanks, James

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[macruby] #103: MacRuby Application development with Xcode 3.1, part 2
by macruby 25 Jul '08

25 Jul '08

#103: MacRuby Application development with Xcode 3.1, part 2 ------------------------------------+--------------------------------------- Reporter: davejrdn(a)bellsouth.net | Owner: lsansonetti(a)apple.com Type: defect | Status: new Priority: blocker | Milestone: MacRuby 0.2 Component: MacRuby | Keywords: ------------------------------------+--------------------------------------- I did not see how I could add a comment to my original ticket #100, so I am creating a new ticket. I guess it was my fault for putting multiple issues in one ticket, as only the iPhone part of my ticket got addressed. I am running the latest XCode 3.1 development environment. I have also done the MacRuby install. But MacRuby does not show up as an application template when I try to create a project for MacRuby development. I can understand it does not show up for the iPhone OS platform. But it also does not show up for Mac OS X platform. It looks like there is an incompatibility between XCode 3.0 and 3.1 with respect to these application templates. -- Ticket URL: <https://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/103> macruby <http://macruby.org/>

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[macruby] #100: MacRuby Application development with Xcode 3.1
by macruby 25 Jul '08

25 Jul '08

#100: MacRuby Application development with Xcode 3.1 ------------------------------------+--------------------------------------- Reporter: davejrdn(a)bellsouth.net | Owner: lsansonetti(a)apple.com Type: defect | Status: new Priority: blocker | Milestone: MacRuby 0.2 Component: MacRuby | Keywords: MacRuby Xcode 3.1 iPhone ------------------------------------+--------------------------------------- I am new to MacRuby and use of Xcode, I have been a Java developer using Eclipse for over a decade... I am running Xcode 3.1, which supports both Mac OS X and the iPhone OS platforms. My hope was to be able to use MacRuby for Ruby development on the iTouch/iPhone. I wanted to first go through the tutorial. I have installed MacRuby and verified it was placed in the right directories. But when I try to create a new project, it asks me to choose a template. Both the iPhone OS and the Mac OS X platforms allow you to select an Application template. But neither one lists "MacRuby Application" as one of the options. There are a number of Cocoa-Ruby application templates, but my understanding is these are a different Ruby implementation. Is there an issue that MacRuby does not support Xcode 3.1 yet? If so, when will that be addressed? If it is not too hard, is it possibly to enable it for both Mac OS X AND the iPhone OS platforms? (please!) I am running MacRuby 0.2. I see a 0.3 and 1.0 listed. Would one of these resolve the issue? Do I need to build from source to get these later versions? -- Ticket URL: <https://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/100> macruby <http://macruby.org/>

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Re: [MacRuby-devel] [macruby] #81: Enumerable::Enumerator seems to be broken
by macruby 25 Jul '08

25 Jul '08

#81: Enumerable::Enumerator seems to be broken -------------------------------+-------------------------------------------- Reporter: flatter(a)gmail.com | Owner: lsansonetti(a)apple.com Type: defect | Status: new Priority: blocker | Milestone: MacRuby 0.3 Component: MacRuby | Resolution: Keywords: | -------------------------------+-------------------------------------------- Changes (by lsansonetti(a)apple.com) * milestone: => MacRuby 0.3 -- Ticket URL: <http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/81#comment:1> macruby <http://macruby.org/>

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Re: [MacRuby-devel] [macruby] #90: macruby fails to install (problem with File.join)
by macruby 25 Jul '08

25 Jul '08

#90: macruby fails to install (problem with File.join) -----------------------------------+---------------------------------------- Reporter: jakub.suder(a)gmail.com | Owner: lsansonetti(a)apple.com Type: defect | Status: new Priority: blocker | Milestone: MacRuby 0.3 Component: MacRuby | Resolution: Keywords: | -----------------------------------+---------------------------------------- Changes (by lsansonetti(a)apple.com) * milestone: => MacRuby 0.3 Comment: Probably a bytestring problem. -- Ticket URL: <http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/90#comment:2> macruby <http://macruby.org/>

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[macruby] #97: A selector cannot be nil
by macruby 09 Jul '08

09 Jul '08

#97: A selector cannot be nil ----------------------------------------+----------------------------------- Reporter: vincent.isambart(a)gmail.com | Owner: lsansonetti(a)apple.com Type: defect | Status: new Priority: blocker | Milestone: Component: MacRuby | Keywords: ----------------------------------------+----------------------------------- In Objectve-C a selector can be nil, for example the following code is correct: {{{ NSMenuItem *dummyItem = [[NSMenuItem alloc] initWithTitle:@"" action:nil keyEquivalent:@""]; }}} but in MacRuby we get an error: {{{ % macruby -e "framework 'Cocoa'; NSMenuItem.alloc.initWithTitle('', action:nil, keyEquivalent:'')" -e:1:in `initWithTitle:action:keyEquivalent:': can't convert Ruby object `nil' to Objective-C value of type `:' (ArgumentError) from -e:1:in `<main>' }}} So I think MacRuby should support conversion from nil for selectors. -- Ticket URL: <https://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/97> macruby <http://macruby.org/>

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Re: [MacRuby-devel] [macruby] #46: Interface Builder unable to parse new keyed arguments, fails to load class files
by macruby 09 Jul '08

09 Jul '08

#46: Interface Builder unable to parse new keyed arguments, fails to load class files --------------------------------+------------------------------------------- Reporter: apparently(a)fake.ru | Owner: lsansonetti(a)apple.com Type: defect | Status: new Priority: blocker | Milestone: MacRuby 0.3 Component: MacRuby | Resolution: Keywords: | --------------------------------+------------------------------------------- Changes (by lsansonetti(a)apple.com) * milestone: MacRuby 1.0 => MacRuby 0.3 Comment: Yes, we need to rewrite rb_nibtool.rb so that it can handle the MacRuby syntax. -- Ticket URL: <http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/46#comment:3> macruby <http://macruby.org/>

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