[MacRuby-devel] Threads and iPhone

[Laurent Sansonetti]

On Dec 27, 2008, at 3:17 PM, Vincent Isambart wrote:

>> Will it be easier to implement and manage multithreaded apps with  
>> MacRuby?
> MacRuby's threads are exactly the same as Ruby 1.9. Nothing less  
> nothing more.
> When you say "easier", if you mean easier than ObjC perhaps a little
> bit, but that's all.

That's true, MacRuby trunk uses YARV, and its thread model is simple,  
it maps every Ruby thread as a POSIX thread but still maintain a  
global lock around them.

However, in the next version of MacRuby (0.5) this will significantly  
change. Stay tuned for more information regarding 0.5, in the next few  
days.

>> And will MacRuby be eventually rolled into iphone Dev?  Or is this  
>> one of
>> those sensitive Apple NDA iPhone issues?
> I think Laurent would not be able to reply about this one, but it
> looks like you should not wait too much for an iPhone version of
> MacRuby.
> First, the iPhone is much slower than a Mac so MacRuby would be a
> little slow. An other problem is that autozone (the GC used in ObjC 2
> and MacRuby) does not seem to have an ARM version. Of course it's
> probably doable (and maybe someone in Apple is working on it, I have
> no idea) but well for the time being I would not count on it.

The iPhone cannot be discussed on this list. However, as Vincent  
stated, there are some technical restrictions that prevent MacRuby to  
fully work on the iPhone, today. But tomorrow is another day :-)

Laurent