[MacRuby-devel] MacRuby on the iPhone

[Jon Olson]

Hi folks,

I'm new to the list, but I checked the archives and I don't *think* what I'm suggesting here has been suggested/done before.

I've been putting some effort towards getting MacRuby going on the iPhone. After reviewing the GC situation, it seems like using the Boehm collector and simply pointing CoreFoundation's default allocator at it would be a good solution to get things up and going. Cocoa seems to use CF's default allocator for a default calls to alloc, so I think this covers most allocations that you'd expect to see. Also, since you can bind free() to NULL when creating an allocator, it seems like you can largely negate the effect (if not the performance hit) of Cocoa-internal autorelease pools releasing all of your resources.

I've managed to produce an armv6 build of Boehm and an armv6 build of the macruby libraries. I've also talked macrubyc into spitting out ARM executable code (by just tweaking the LLVM target). Anyway, I figured before I went much further I'd express my intent and make sure I haven't duplicated too much of anyone else's work.

Does anything I'm suggesting sound totally crazy?

-- Jon