Mac developers intrigued by Ruby [1]'s ease of use and simple maintainability but deterred by its turgid performance will be happy to hear that MacRuby 0.5 [2] - aka its "experimental branch" - is remarkably snappy.

Exactly how snappy is remarkably snappy? A suite of low-level benchmark tests [3] recently performed by Antonio Cangiano of Zen and the Art of Programming [4] 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 [5] to the language on its Developer Connection website. You can also download [6] 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 [7]. ®

Links

1. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
2. http://www.macruby.org/blog/2009/03/28/experimental-branch.html
3. http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/03/29/why-macruby-matters/
4. http://antoniocangiano.com/
5. http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/scriptingautomation/cocoaappswithmacruby.html
6. http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/macruby.html
7. http://www.macruby.org/

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