[MacRuby-devel] Contributions (Was: Experimental branch status)

[Laurent Sansonetti]

So, to recap, I think the following contributions will be welcome:

- Maintaining the website (blog, content, etc.) and writing tutorials.  
There are lots of very interesting blog posts around that could I  
think be transformed into a tutorial or into a recipe (shorter  
tutorial). I think we need more recipes, for instance how to embed  
MacRuby in your app, how to use a specific and complex Cocoa class  
(NSOutlineView/NSTableView/etc.) in Ruby, etc.

- Writing / translating sample code for MacRuby. We will bundle it in  
the MacRuby distribution. If you wrote anything interesting in MacRuby  
that could be used as a sample code, let us now. Creating new sample  
code is cool, but porting an existing Objective-C sample code is good  
too.

- Specs: working on the 1.8 -> 1.9 rubyspec transition (see Eloy's  
message above). Eloy is currently doing all the specs maintenance as  
well and I think he will not be against help :) Also, we recently  
started writing MacRuby-specific specs, they need to be extended.  
Finally, we need to start working on passing the core specs (we only  
did language so far).

- Porting C extensions to the Ruby FFI API. We started working on a  
compatible Ruby FFI API, we still have a plan to support C extensions  
but not in the very near future and the performance will not be great,  
FFI will be faster. Also if most of the well-known C extensions have  
been ported, we might simply decide to not support C extensions, which  
is one less thing to do. Also, working on Ruby FFI-compatible  
libraries will make JRuby / Rubinius / etc. users happy :)

- HotCocoa: I will leave this part to Rich and Matt, but I think they  
will be mostly interested in mappings. Try to create a HotCocoa app,  
then contribute mappings for things that do not exist (or improve the  
existing ones by contributing custom methods, etc.).

- Core: there are lots of things to do, if you feel hacking on the low- 
level bits. We maintain a TODO file which contains a few things that  
still need to be done. At this point, the JIT compiler is almost  
finished (AOT is maybe finished at 10%, though) and the VM is still  
under development. A good way to start hacking is to run the  
test_vm.rb test suite, pick a failing test and try to fix it.  
Contributing new failing tests is also highly welcome, you can simply  
use the miniruby executable and try to make it crash (it's not hard,  
you will see).

- ... anything more? :)

Laurent

On May 29, 2009, at 6:57 AM, Eloy Duran wrote:

> I haven't actively spoken about this with Laurent over the last  
> week, but afaik not much changed since last time, which means that  
> the support is not nearly far enough to start using it. We decided  
> that we want the FFI specs in the repo in order to finish this work  
> appropriately, which would need work to be converted from RSpec to  
> MSpec.
>
> Luckily Brian Ford (from the rubyspec project) was already planning  
> on incorporating them. I haven't had time to check if they're in  
> yet. So this is another area where people could help out. By porting  
> the ruby-ffi specs to mspec and integrating them into the rubyspec.
>
> Cheers,
> Eloy
>
> On May 29, 2009, at 1:28 PM, Chuck Remes wrote:
>
>> How is progress on support FFI? That seems to be the new ruby-way  
>> for interfacing to native code supported by JRuby, Rubinius and to  
>> some extent the 1.9.x codeline. With FFI built in, as gems are  
>> updated to support the other ruby interpreters and/or compilers  
>> then MacRuby would be supported for "free" through those efforts.
>>
>> cr
>>
>> On May 28, 2009, at 11:42 PM, Matt Aimonetti wrote:
>>
>>> The other thing that needs to be done is to port/fix the popular  
>>> Ruby gems which don't work on MacRuby yet. Also, writing wrappers  
>>> for common obj-c libraries/frameworks would be very useful.
>>>
>>> If you are interested in writing tutorials/articles, feel free to  
>>> contact me offline so I can show you how to use our blog engine  
>>> tool. (I think Rich is planning on releasing a tutorial on how to  
>>> do that, but that might not happen right away)
>>>
>>> - Matt
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