[MacRuby-devel] 3 Questions, One about language restriction, one about platform targeting and the final about the standard library.

[Laurent Sansonetti]

Hi Anthony,

On Feb 3, 2010, at 5:36 PM, Anthony Buck wrote:

> Hi all,
>     I have a couple of questions which I have attempted to answer to
> no-avail. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right
> direction (Quite new to OS X development so my apologies if it is
> mealy my incompetence that has lead me here.)
>
> 1)  I am looking into using MacRuby and am interested in it's ability
> to AOT compile ruby code down to an executable. I am wondering though
> whether this places a restriction on the code in any way? Is there a
> subset of ruby which is supported or can i go ahead and perform all
> the meta-magic i want and still have the code AOT compiled?

Yes, the AOT compiler should fully support the Ruby language. If you  
find something that does not work when compiled, it's a bug :) Please  
report them and we will fix them.

> 2)  I am also interested in targeting both 10.6 and 10.5 with any
> applications developed (at 50%+ OS X share it is imposable to ignore
> with any conscience.) I have looked at the deployment task shipped
> with Mac Ruby and love the fact that I can have a simple .app to pass
> on to my users however, am i right in thinking that this .app will
> only operate on 10.6 machines? If so is there any way to develop
> either a combined or separate .app which is useful to users of 10.5?
> Is this possible when the development system is 10.6?

It is currently not possible, as explained in http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/354 
. Note that this might be supported in a future release. We also  
accept contributions :)

> 3) I also read an article about how the developer of Stopwatch*
> packaged said application without the "standard library." am I right
> in thinking that this is the ruby standard library which was left
> unpackaged? Wouldn't this render the application un-runnable?

Yes, it is the Ruby standard library. If the application does not use  
it there is no reason why removing it would cause a problem. In fact,  
we recommend to prefer the Cocoa APIs over the Ruby standard library  
when it is possible. Cocoa is much better designed and implemented.

Laurent