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

[Kevin Walzer]

On 5/16/13 2:38 PM, Mark Villacampa wrote:
>
> 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.

It's unfortunate that MacRuby is suffering from bit-rot, but it was not 
an optimal solution for desktop development in any event. It was 
incompatible with standard Ruby in subtle ways, and was an incomplete 
implementation.

Standard Ruby has nice bindings to several UI toolkits (Qt, Tk, wx) and 
can access Cocoa API's via Tim Burks' under-documented rubyobjc module, 
but it too has problems for desktop apps. Everything kind of falls apart 
when you look for available deployment tools outside of those that are 
tightly bound to RubyCocoa or MacRuby (i.e. standaloneify).

It would be really great if someone could put together ruby2app (Ruby 
version of py2app) in a way that would work with any Ruby libraries, not 
just Cocoa ones. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

--Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
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