[MacRuby-devel] [ANN] MacRuby 0.2

[Laurent Sansonetti]

Hi,

After 3 months of development, here comes the second release of
MacRuby, 0.2! Check it out while it's still hot!

MacRuby is a version of Ruby 1.9, ported to run directly on top of Mac
OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C common runtime and
garbage collector, and the CoreFoundation framework. While still a
work in progress, it is the goal of MacRuby to enable the creation of
full-fledged Mac OS X applications which do not sacrifice performance
in order to enjoy the benefits of using Ruby.

You can learn more about MacRuby, and download a binary installer,
from the website:

http://ruby.macosforge.org

This is an important release, addressing many bugs, but also
re-implementing parts of the runtime using the CoreFoundation
framework.

In MacRuby 0.2, all strings, arrays and hashes are now native Cocoa
types, respectively NSString, NSArray and NSDictionary objects. 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 not necessary
anymore 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. And vice-versa, any method of the Ruby String class can be
performed on an NSString that comes from Objective-C.

Enjoy,

Laurent