Guest post by “In 2007, software developer Laurent Sansonetti launched an open source software project called MacRuby. It aimed to build a Ruby interpreter on top of the Objective-C runtime, providing a seamless bridge between Ruby and OS X “Cocoa” ecosystem—and it succeeded. Now Sansonetti hopes to do something similar for iOS.”
is it available for Gnustep? Can I compile it on my FreeBSD box with clang/llvm? (without using the iOS APIs but possibly the GNUstep ones)
Why would you not just use MacRuby? It is targeting the “right” version of the API after all. I doubt it would work though, as there are some technical differences in the way the ObjectiveC runtime is implemented between MacOS (and therefore iOS) and GNUStep, and you would probably also need an ObjectiveC 2 capable feature set. There’s no reason you couldn’t try though.
It generates native-machine code through LLVM? If its really like this, i think theres no need more for obj-c code.
I mean… its ruby. The best programming language ever.
And writing Apps through Xcode is somehow… stupid. I mean it should be Easy, but why i have to drag and drop one thing to the other point and so on. I mean, as long as you do not design the Ui, the only thing you really need is an code editor – and nothing more.
(Oh, i think, i made some guys angry with my opinion ;D)
Kind of.
It is Ruby like, but it uses static typing, as far as, I am aware.
Interface builder generates XIB files, which are external to your code. There’s no real advantage to hard coding the UI in your exe. The XIB and compiled NIB live in their own world, and being able to independently edit them (well, maybe not in XCode 4+) is a real advantage. In all of my years using Project Builder, XCode and Interface Builder, I’ve never felt the need to hardcore the UI. Actually, as my other main dev roe was in Delphi for 8+ years, I pretty much love the idea of externally defined UI. This was the thing I also loved about Qt 3.x when I played with it, and why I always gravitated towards Glade with GTK+
Muscle memory kicking in there??
Hahaha! All hardcode all the time!!
Is Apple trying to tell us something when hardcode is corrected to hardcore by the iOS autocorrect?
I really miss Delphi.
It would be great to have a native code compiler for Ruby, that I could use in any desired platform.
But I guess RubyMotion and MacRuby depend too much on Objective-C runtime, to be able, to be portable.
Im new to Ruby but I figured what the hell and bought this so I could kick the tires. We are slowly converting over to using Ruby for web development at work anyway – this seemed like a good avenue to get more comfortable with the language.
I have built simple iOS apps in Objective-C, and while I got my head around iOS development enough to function I still can’t say I like it. It just feels awkward. I thought about trying MonoTouch, as I am quite comfortable with C#, but I never got around to it. After using RubyMotion for like 20 minutes, I realize it wasn’t really Objective-C that was bugging me all this time – it was Xcode.
I hate Xcode – it is a strange, bewildering IDE that seems to do everything “differently” for no clear reason. I can usually fathom WHY a product chooses to go about things a certain way – but Xcode has always been a mystery to me. I was constantly poking it, prodding it, beating google to death and saying incantations just to get it to do what I wanted, often failing in the process. I can’t say I have used it a lot, maybe spent like 50 or 100 hours in it total – but in that time I still don’t feel like I understand a tenth of what the hell it is doing under the hood most of the time.
RubyMotion just lets you use your favorite editor (I use Sublime) and you use rake to do your builds. My god, why didn’t Apple make things this simple??? I had it working in like 15 minutes with zero fuss. All the bullshit boilerplate is just pushed out the way – it is just your code and nothing else. I haven’t even really started to get used to Ruby yet, but this is like 100 times better than Xcode even if you ignore the language difference…
Im sold. This shit is cool
Remember that this is not MRI Ruby (or whichever you use at work) that you’re writing. I’m not sure if there are a lot of differences but it I wanted to point it out.