

Subject: [ANN] MacRuby 0.2

From: "Laurent Sansonetti" <laurent.sansonetti@ a . m

Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 09:47:12 +0900

Hi, After 3 months of development, here comes the second release of MacRuby, 0.2! Check it out while it's still hot! MacRuby is a version of Ruby 1.9, ported to run directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C common runtime and garbage collector, and the CoreFoundation framework. While still a work in progress, it is the goal of MacRuby to enable the creation of full-fledged Mac OS X applications which do not sacrifice performance in order to enjoy the benefits of using Ruby. You can learn more about MacRuby, and download a binary installer, from the website: http://ruby.macosforge.org This is an important release, addressing many bugs, but also re-implementing parts of the runtime using the CoreFoundation framework. In MacRuby 0.2, all strings, arrays and hashes are now native Cocoa types, respectively NSString, NSArray and NSDictionary objects. The entire String, Array and Hash interface was rewritten on top of the Cocoa equivalents, using the powerful CoreFoundation framework. The previous implementation, inherited from MRI, is not used anymore. The rationale behind this change is simple. It is not necessary anymore to convert Ruby primitive types to Cocoa, or vice-versa. For example, a String created in MacRuby can be passed as is, without conversion, to an underlying C or Objective-C API that expects an NSString. And vice-versa, any method of the Ruby String class can be performed on an NSString that comes from Objective-C. Enjoy, Laurent