February 2011 - MacRuby-devel - lists.macosforge.org

About rake, llvm_config and "prefix"
by Huahang Liu 22 Feb '11

22 Feb '11

Greetings All, I was trying to build MacRuby. However, I got an error saying that: The llvm-config executable was not located as /usr/local/bin/llvm-config. Please make sure LLVM is correctly installed on your machine and pass the llvm_config option to rake if necessary. I do have llvm 2.8 installed but resides a directory other than /usr/local/bin/. How may I tell rake to search for it? What exact command shall I type? BTW, is it possible to tell something like a "prefix" to rake when we want to install MacRuby into a specific path? Thanks, Huahang

2 1

BridgeSupport build step for framework projects
by Matt Aimonetti 21 Feb '11

21 Feb '11

I wrote an extremely short tutorial on how to automatically generate a BridgeSupport file for your Framework Xcode project: http://merbist.com/2011/02/19/bridgesupport-build/ Hopefully that will save some people the headache to figure it out on their own (not that it's hard tho). One thing I didn't mention because it seemed very obvious... you need to have your target set to copy the headers to the final product. - Matt

2 1

loop audio file seamlessly
by Zachary Kaplan 21 Feb '11

21 Feb '11

hello all, i would like to loop an audio file seamlessly. i have a file that, when looped in logic or garage band, sounds perfect. an nssound object with "loops = true" in macruby using the same file however, has an audible pause between each iteration, meaning our loop is not seamless, ultimately ruining our users' audio enhanced experience. could somebody please help me into the right direction :} thanks in advance, -zak

2 1

Using Sequel and Sqlite3
by Craig Williams 19 Feb '11

19 Feb '11

I have built an app to quickly find MacVim commands to help me learn MacVim. The app works great on my machine but when I try to use it on another machine I get Sqlite3 errors. I am embedding MacRuby in the project and have tried vendoring Sqlite3 and Sequel as well. Embedding the gems did not fix the problem. I have put the project on GitHub if anyone wants to take a look at it. https://github.com/CraigWilliams/MVimLookup Thanks, Craig Williams Applications Developer Factory Design Labs t / 303.573.9100 x417 w / factorylabs.com F/

1 0

dtrace doesn't get sourcefile and line numbers
by Gabriel Ayuso 19 Feb '11

19 Feb '11

I ran a dtrace script on the MacRuby samples to print all the info provided to the method_entry probe. The sourcefile was always either empty or "core" and the linenumber was always 0. Do I have to execute the script in some particular way for this information to be received? SCRIPT: ------------- #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s #pragma D option quiet BEGIN { printf("Target pid: %d\n\n", $target); } macruby$target:::method-entry { printf("Class name: %s, Method name %s, Source file %s, Line number %d\n", copyinstr(arg0), copyinstr(arg1), copyinstr(arg2), arg3); } COMMAND: ------------- sudo dtrace -s call_info.d -c ../build/AnimatingViews.app/Contents/MacOS/AnimatingViews OUTPUT: ------------- Class name: DemoView, Method name randf:, Source file , Line number 0 Class name: DemoView, Method name rand:, Source file , Line number 0 Class name: Float, Method name to_int, Source file core, Line number 0 Class name: Class, Method name new:, Source file , Line number 0 Class name: CGPoint, Method name x, Source file , Line number 0 Class name: CGPoint, Method name y, Source file , Line number 0 Class name: Fixnum, Method name to_i, Source file , Line number 0 Thanks, Gabriel Ayuso

1 0

Re: [MacRuby-devel] WeakRef advice
by Charles Oliver Nutter 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '11

Another important use of weakrefs came to mind: avoiding finalization. In general, finalizers are a bad idea. They often block GC, or at least block each other. They add overhead to GC cycles, since either finalizers must be run or objects must be enqueued for another thread to run their finalizers. By using WeakReferences (and especially PhantomReferences) you can drive finalization from userland code, avoiding much of the GC overhead that might otherwise result. - Charlie On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 5:28 PM, Charles Oliver Nutter <headius(a)headius.com> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 5:28 PM, Laurent Sansonetti > <lsansonetti(a)apple.com> wrote: >> Hi Alan, >> Do you control the data structure that holds a reference to 'B'? If yes, you >> may want to use NSHashTable which supports weak references. >> To me, this sounds like a design problem. Maybe your project can be >> re-architectured to avoid this pattern. > > Weak references and weak lists/hashes are often very useful for caches > you need to age out or when you need to associate data with a given > instance of an object without holding hard references. Using weak > references is definitely not a design problem in itself. > > I'm also disappointed that you'd recommend people use NSHashTable > rather than just fixing WeakRef :) In JRuby, we nuked weakref.rb some > time ago because it has a lot of problems. Instead, we wrap the JVM's > builtin weakrefs. > > See also the weakling gem, which (for JRuby) provides additional > features mentioned in that Ruby redmine ticket like reference queues > and a simple weak ID hash to use in place of _id2ref. > > - Charlie >

1 0

WeakRef advice
by Alan Skipp 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '11

Hello everyone, I've been doing some research into weak references in ruby and from what I've read it seems that Ruby's WeakRef implementation is both inefficient and unsafe. Here is the thread discussing the matter: http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4168 As Macruby has a different garbage collector I don't know if these problems are also present? I am working on a blocks based API for Key Value Coding and need to keep a weak reference to objects. Here is a very basic example of how this would look in garbage collected Objective-C: @interface Observer : NSObject { __weak id obj; } @implementation - (Observer *)initObservedObject:(id)object { obj = object; } Essentially I just need a Macruby equivalent of the above. Is there a simple way to have a weak referenced instance variable in Macruby? al

3 5

Re: [MacRuby-devel] book idea - "making it look like Ruby"
by Charles Oliver Nutter 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '11

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Rich Morin <rdm(a)cfcl.com> wrote: > At 6:09 PM -0200 2/11/11, Caio Chassot wrote: >> On 2011-02-11, at 15:25 , Matt Aimonetti wrote: >>> >>> Magically converting a snake_case method call to a >>> CamelCase method dispatch is bad for peformance >>> and documentation. > > It's not clear to me that there would be a significant > performance impact. It might be possible to do (most > of) the translations at start-up time, avoiding much > impact during execution. In JRuby it currently has no performance impact. The camel_cased versions are defined as aliases to the original. I forget whether we define them as traditional aliases (wrapped by another structure) or if we just bind the same method object under all names. We have also debated making the aliases *redispatch* so that if you wanted to replace them all you'd just replace the original camelCased version. That turned out to be a perf issue in practice, so we backed it off until we can come up with a nice way to have multiple names resolve to the same method object. FWIW, JRuby users would go ape if we took away snake_cased versions of Java names. They love having everything look like Ruby, and I personally think it helps the code flow a lot more naturally to have a single style...not to mention you don't have to remember whether you're calling a snake_cased or camelCased method...you just always use snake_case. > The question of documentation is also somewhat iffy. > There is already a difference in appearance between > the ObjC and MacRuby calling syntaxes. Would merely > allowing (ie, not requiring) the use of snake_case > make this much problem much worse? As far as I know, there's never been any confusion about snake_cased aliases in JRuby. People read the JavaDocs, mentally switch to snake_case, and proceed. - Charlie

1 0

Any interest in a better debugger than ruby-debug for MacRuby?
by Rocky Bernstein 16 Feb '11

16 Feb '11

Is there interest in funding someone to work on a better debugger than ruby-debug MacRuby? Over the last decade or so, I've been writing debuggers as a work-related hobby. I'm looking for work, and I thought maybe I should try to do something related to debuggers. I currently maintain ruby-debug but have rewritten that for Rubinius and a patched version of YARV 1.9.2. If anyone's interested, please contact me privately for my resume and more details.

2 2

Issue with running unit tests when requiring rubygems
by Gabriel Ayuso 14 Feb '11

14 Feb '11

I wanted to try using mocha to write unit tests with mocks. After requiring "rubygems" a NoMethodError exception was thrown when attempting to run the tests. The method which wasn't found was 'run'. If I remove the call to require "rubygems" my test fails because I can't use mocha but the NoMethodError exception which was thrown is not thrown anymore. Am I missing something? Thanks, Gabriel Ayuso

4 8