[MacRuby-devel] 0.2 available for testing

[Laurent Sansonetti]

Hi all,

Well, after 3 months and a few days of development, 0.2 is now mostly  
ready to be released.

I just merged trunk into the testing branch, please give it a try!

$ svn co http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/ruby/MacRuby/branches/testing 
  MacRuby
$ cd MacRuby
$ autoconf
$ ./configure --enable-framework --enable-fat-binary --program- 
prefix=mac
$ make
$ sudo make install-nodoc

# the `make install' target should now work, but it takes around 15  
minutes to generate the RI files, so you might want to skip that step.  
But at least it should not crash and/or eat all your memory anymore.

Unless a big problem is reported, I will release 0.2 next week. In the  
meantime I will write/port some additional sample code.

I also wrote a project roadmap, for the upcoming releases: http://ruby.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/MacRubyRoadmap

Some notable 0.2 changes:

The String, Array and Hash have been re-implemented using their  
CoreFoundation equivalent, respectively CFString, CFArray and  
CFDictionary. For example, String is not a class anymore but a  
shortcut (alias) to NSMutableString. The whole String interface has  
been re-implemented on top of NSString. Every string created by  
MacRuby is therefore a CFString/NSString, and can be passed without  
any conversion to an underlying API that expects a CFString/NSString.  
Same thing for Array and Hash.

All well-known GC crashers and memory leaks have been fixed. Lots of  
bugs have also been fixed.

irb/erb/rdoc/ri should work!

The 1.9 source base was synchronized with the upstream trunk. The new  
1.9 APIs introduced since the latest snapshot were implemented.

Laurent