Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/02/macruby_0_5/
'Freakishly fast' Ruby coming to the Mac
Blowing up the bridge
Posted in Software, 2nd April 2009 00:50 GMT
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Mac developers intrigued by Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/)'s ease of use and simple maintainability but deterred by its turgid performance will be happy to hear that MacRuby 0.5 (http://www.macruby.org/blog/2009/03/28/experimental-branch.html) - aka its "experimental branch" - is remarkably snappy.
Exactly how snappy is remarkably snappy? A suite of low-level benchmark tests (http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/03/29/why-macruby-matters/) recently performed by Antonio Cangiano of Zen and the Art of Programming (http://antoniocangiano.com/) shows MacRuby 0.5 to be on average just under three times as fast as Ruby 1.9.1, with some operations coming in at nearly eight times faster.
According to Cagiano: "MacRuby... has the potential to become a game changer - at least for Mac developers. Based on Ruby 1.9, MacRuby’s main aim is to provide programmers with the ability to write Mac OS X applications in Ruby, making Ruby a first-class Cocoa programming language."
The MacRuby open-source development project is sponsored by Apple, which includes an introduction (http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/scriptingautomation/cocoaappswithmacruby.html) to the language on its Developer Connection website. You can also download (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/macruby.html) a free version of the most-recently qualified development version, MacRuby 0.4, from Apple's software vault.
MacRuby's raison d'être is to overcome the performance limitations of RubyCocoa, which functions as a speed-robbing intercommunication bridge between the Mac OS X Objective-C runtime component and the standard Ruby interpreter.
Simply put, the MacRuby project is working to create a Ruby implementation that sits directly on top of the Objective-C runtime, eliminating the RubyCocoa bridge.
Cagiano claimed that MacRuby 0.4 - which allows a developer to deliver an application in a standard Mac OS X .app package - is both stable and effective. However, he said that MacRuby’s real promise lies in MacRuby 0.5, which he called "freakishly fast."
It appears that Mac developers may soon have another full-fledged - and either remarkably snappy or freakishly fast - Cocoa-compliant development language with which to deliver desktop applications.
More information and up-to-date news on the MacRuby development effort can be found at MacRuby.org (http://www.macruby.org/). ®