[MacRuby-devel] OS X10.9 & MacRuby's future...

Thu May 16 11:51:45 PDT 2013

@Shaun: I think RubyMotion 2 is that offering.

@Mark: Well said. I dabbled in MacRuby and thought it would be great if
'they' could get something going for IOS. MY first thought when RubyMotion
came out was I needed to buy a license to support HipByte, I have never
regretted this and bought my extension last week. The paradigm for
RubyMotion has been to step outside the Apple Toolchain to allow developers
to produce applications with ease. I am pleased to see this continue in the
Cocoa application space. And, the community is almost worth the price of
admission alone. :) Heck, I am already giving Apple a hundred bucks a year,
so giving Laurent another hundred to actually build in a language I like
isn't that much more.

Andy Stechishin (lurker)

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Shaun August <saugust at me.com> wrote:

>  I would like to see Laurent and Hipbyte offer a paid version of MacRuby
> with the same pricing structure as RubyMotion. I'd buy it...
>
> --
> Shaun
>
>
> On Thursday, 16 May, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Mark Villacampa wrote:
>
>  I'm a longtime RubyMotion user, and MacRuby user before that. I want to
> share my view as to what is the current status of MacRuby and what can
> happen in the future.
>
> The momentum around MacRuby has been inexistent for almost a year and a
> half. That is, since Laurent Sansonetti (the original creator of MacRuby)
> left Apple, and that left the project without maintainers who were being
> paid to work on it. Only Watson and a couple other maintainers have been
> doing maintenance work and fixing a couple of bugs.
>
> Since nobody is being paid to maintain it, and (AFAIK) there is no
> company/individual whose main/critical systems depended on MacRuby, nobody
> has taken over the project. This is pretty much a chicken-egg situation.
>
> That said, a year ago, Laurent launched RubyMotion, a product based on
> MacRuby which introduces many new features, such as an ARC based memory
> model, and iOS support (dropping OSX support). Just a few days ago, in the
> first anniversary of RubyMotion, they introduced OSX support.
>
> Rubymotion is not open source, and the license costs 200$, plus an annual
> renewal fee of 99$. Two reasons that people sometimes argue for not
> investing in RM are:
>
> - "It's closed source, it might disappear at any moment": Actually,
> RubyMotion is probably more likely to stay in the long term than MacRuby
> was at the beginning. Despite Apple being a huge company, MacRuby was kind
> of an experiment that they could kill at any moment. For HipByte (the
> company behind Rubymotion), Rubymotion is its main product and the one that
> pays its employees. They are way more interested in watching RM succeed
> than Apple was in watching MacRuby succeed.
>
> - "It's too expensive": for playing around or releasing a pet project or
> free app that is not one of your ways of income, that might be the case.
> However, for a company or individual that wants to develop a product from
> which they hope to get some revenue, that price is ridiculous. I've seen
> PHP libraries for creating web forms more expensive than RubyMotion
> (nothing against those libraries). We're talking about a static compiler
> and a whole toolchain for developing iOS apps. If you're a student and want
> to play around with RubyMotion, there is a student discount available (send
> them an email for more information).
>
> So my conclusion is: If you want to develop OSX applications and you liked
> MacRuby, invest in getting a RubyMotion license, you probably won't be
> disappointed.
>
> Mark.
>
> On Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 8:01 PM, Christopher S Martin wrote:
>
> They recently added support for OS X to rubymotion:
> http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/49943751398/rubymotion-goes-2-0-and-gets-os-x-support-templates
> That said, since rubymotion is (I believe) based off of macruby with some
> additions specifically around static compilation of apps, I don't know if
> the issues around GC/ARC would be any better in rubymotion on OS X, as I've
> only used it for iOS.
>
>
> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Jeff Dyck <fsjjeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Just wanted to add a ditto to this - I'm looking at migrating some old
> AppleScript Studio projects to MacRuby - my initial testing about a year
> ago was great, but it seems the stability of MacRuby as a development
> platform is in question to me at least... I've already been abandoned by
> AppleScript Studio, don't really want to have to go through relearning a
> new language and migrating projects a third time.
>
> I'm seeing a few comments on RubyMotion - does that work for developing OS
> X projects as well?  I was under the impression that was for iOS only, but
> I can't say I've looked into it much.
>
> Jeff
>
> On May 16, 2013, at 10:40 AM, Michael Shantzis <michael at shantzis.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hello all (and especially Carolyn),
> >
> > I just want to say that I have the same question, specifically regarding
> the
> > GC/ARC issue.
> >
> > The context in which this came up was very revealing. I had been
> developing a
> > fairly complex Cocoa project (ARC enabled) and decided that I had to add
> some tests.
> > Using MacRuby seemed like the natural solution. I quickly noticed,
> though, that I
> > couldn't.
> >
> > Is there still any momentum behind MacRuby?  Is there any solution to
> the issue
> > of mixing it with ARC?  I really hope the answer to these two questions
> is "yes."
> >
> > Thank you,
> > Michael Shantzis
> >
> >
> > On May 16, 2013, at 8:32 AM, Carolyn Ann Grant <
> carolyn.ann.grant at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi, I've got a question about the future of MacRuby. I like it, and
> have started working on a project or two using it, but I've been reading
> about GC and ARC, Ruby 2.0, RubyMotion and so on, and wonder where MacRuby
> is going? I'm quite concerned because I've put a good amount of time into
> my MacRuby projects.
> >>
> >> I wish I had the knowledge and skill to help with MacRuby - I really do
> like it! - but unfortunately I don't. I also don't want to invest a lot of
> further time in MacRuby if it's not going anywhere. (And I really can't
> spare the $200 it would take to buy RubyMotion.)
> >>
> >> I know this comes across as a bit impertinent, but I really would like
> to know what's happening with MacRuby development. Thanks!
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> MacRuby-devel mailing list
> >> MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
> >> https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macruby-devel
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
> > https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macruby-devel
>
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