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

Thu May 16 12:24:07 PDT 2013

Many of my personal MacRuby projects are somewhat peculiar in that they not only avoid Xcode and Interface builder, they aren't even application bundles. Instead, they're just Ruby files with an executable bit that I run from the command line.

Do you know whether this mode of development is supported under RubyMotion for OS X apps? Or do they presume that you're building packages?

--John

On 16 May 2013, at 11:51 AM, Andy Stechishin <andy.stechishin at gmail.com> wrote:

> @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!
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macruby-devel
>>> 
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