[MacRuby-devel] Grand Central Dispatch and MacRuby?

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Jun 9, 2009, at 5:57 AM, Rich Morin wrote:

> It's also pretty clear that any first-class development language
> on Mac OS X, going forward, will have to support this.  Ruby has
> all sorts of block-based goodness already and Laurent is busily
> implementing JIT for MacRuby, so I speculate that GCD may well be
> in MacRuby's future.
>
> Has anyone looked into this possibility, if only to the extent of
> sketching out what language extensions might be needed?

Various apple folks on this list have, as one might expect, looked  
into the possibility.  Given that MacRuby is a cooperative project  
which involves folks both inside and outside Apple, however, we need  
to wait for SnowLeopard to ship before we do much more than look,  
since this extending the Ruby language to better support parallelism  
is something we need to discuss as a full and complete group before  
making any moves.  Laurent also has more than enough on his plate just  
finishing up the LLVM work and we don't need him distracted by any new  
shiny objects before 0.5 reaches feature parity with 0.4, at the very  
least. :-)  I would prefer that we focus on figuring out what needs to  
be done as a prerequisite for bringing the -experimental branch back  
to trunk before even considering at which of many possible mountains  
we would like to climb next.

- Jordan