[MacRuby-devel] MacRuby promise

[Nat Brown]

this would certainly be useful, but frankly i think that having proper
debugger-integration support in xcode (see
http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/1208 and issue 3037631 in
http://bugreporter.apple.com) would go dramatically farther towards making
macruby useful. edit-and-continue would be great, but setting a breakpoint:
priceless. thx, n@

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 8:22 AM, Matt Aimonetti <mattaimonetti at gmail.com>wrote:

> Very good point Jean Denis. You are totally right, it shouldn't be hard to
> reload all the Ruby source while the code is running. One thing tho, you
> might also have to reset the state of your application, including its
> drawing state. But maybe we could leave that up to the developers.
> What I'm thinking is to test this theory, we could write a small
> application addon which adds an extra window calling into 2 methods: reload
> and reset.
> Reload would basically do rb_main.rb does, reset would reset the state of
> the app after reloading the source files.
> We should also be able to open a REPL window to introspect the code in
> real time. I believe Alloy or Vincent were working on something similar.
>
> - Matt
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 1:15 PM, Jean-Denis MUYS <jdmuys at kleegroup.com>wrote:
>
>> Reading from many messages on this list, I get the impression that
>> MacRuby users are more often than not Ruby programmers coming to Mac
>> programming.
>>
>> I come from the opposite side: I am an experienced Cocoa developer and
>> Ruby newbie.
>>
>> I came to MacRuby for one major reason (and perhaps a few secondary
>> reasons): to speed up development of my Mac applications.
>>
>> My vision of speeding up Mac development is basically to finally reach
>> again what I had almost 20 years ago when I was programming in Macintosh
>> Common Lisp on the Mac for the Mac: developing within a running
>> application, without having to quit it, dynamically adding or modifying
>> classes or methods through a read-eval-print loop.
>>
>> Yet, after having read through Matt's book, this is not what I got. On
>> the contrary, my workflow is at the opposite end of the spectrum:
>> built-run-test-quit loop, similar to what I'm used to with Objective-C.
>> Except it's even worse: at least, typos are caught early with Objective-C.
>> With MacRuby, they aren't, and quite often, I spend a considerable time
>> reaching the point I'm working on before I get an exception from my typo.
>>
>> Since MacRuby *does* have a REPL in the macirb terminal program, I really
>> hope I missed something (that unfortunately is not described in Matt's
>> book): what would be an efficient workflow developing a MacRuby Macintosh
>> application with Xcode?
>>
>> For example, I see that all Ruby code is loaded in rb_main.rb by walking
>> through the app bundle resource directory and calling require(path) on all
>> found ruby files.
>>
>> Would it be possible to require again those files after they have been
>> modified, without quitting the application? Yes it would still require
>> building the app after each change in order to copy the changed ruby files
>> back into the app bundle, but at least Xcode is happy to do so without
>> requiring the app to quit (just don't ask it to "Run").
>>
>> Even better, would it be possible to optionally require the ruby files
>> from the source directory rather than from the app bundle (during
>> development) based on some scheme or configuration dependent symbol? Then
>> building the app would not even be necessary after changes limited to Ruby
>> source code.
>>
>> I would envision MacRuby Xcode templates to include such improvements in
>> rb_main.rb, and also to add a "Debug" menu of some sort to the built app
>> from which the developer could select a command to reload any/all changed
>> Ruby file. This could even be automated using File System events.
>>
>> The workflow loop would then become:
>>
>> 1- test some app action
>> 2- notice a bug. Don't quit. Switch to Xcode.
>> 3- change the relevant Ruby file
>> 4- save
>> 5- there is no step 5
>>
>> I can't see any reason why this would not possible, and even easy, Ruby
>> newbie as I may be. To me, this is the major MacRuby promise, and that
>> promise is not kept yet.
>>
>> Am I out of my mind?
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Jean-Denis
>>
>> (and add a Ruby console/listener to the built app too, in which the REPL
>> is working in the context of the running app).
>> _______________________________________________
>> MacRuby-devel mailing list
>> MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
>> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> MacRuby-devel mailing list
> MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/attachments/20111114/409e7cba/attachment-0001.html>