After a month of hard work we are pleased to offer the second beta of MacRuby 0.5. We are expecting one more beta before shipping the final 0.5.
You can download it from here. Please note that this package only runs on Snow Leopard and above. Users on Leopard can also use MacRuby by building the sources from our repository.
Remember that this is a development version of MacRuby provided for testing and experimentation purposes only. Even though many features are already quite stable at the time of this writing, some of them are still a work in progress.
Please feel encouraged to give it a try and be sure to report any problems you encounter to us. This will help us to ensure that the final release is of the highest possible quality.
You can read about all the changes since the first beta in this status report e-mail on the mailing-list, but here are the most visible changes:
Better Compatibility
We fixed many compatibility bugs, allowing MacRuby to run rdoc, ri, Rack and Sinatra.
RI files are now generated as part of the project build and readable from the macri command-line tool.
We are also able to run simple Rack and Sinatra web applications on MacRuby, using a simple GCD-based web-server that will be covered in an upcoming blog article.
Additionally, MacRuby 0.5 beta 2 ships with experimental support for the BigDecimal, OpenSSL and JSON extensions.
Better Ahead-of-Time Compiler
Many compiler bugs have been fixed and the macrubyc utility is now able to generate fat binaries, via the —arch argument.
$ macrubyc hello.rb -o hello --arch i386 --arch x86_64
Also, macrubyc will generate by default executables linking against MacRuby.framework dynamically, which greatly reduces the executable size. In order to build a full standalone executable, the —static argument must be passed.
A new utility, called macruby_deploy, is now available to help you deploy your MacRuby applications. It provides options to compile ahead-of-time your application’s Ruby source code as well as relocating the MacRuby framework inside the application bundle. This way your application is ready for deployment, with its source code hidden because it is pre-compiled.
$ macruby_deploy
Usage: macruby_deploy [options] application-bundle
--compile Compile the bundle source code
--embed Embed MacRuby inside the bundle
--no-stdlib Do not embed the standard library
-v, --version Display the version
These functionalities are also available as Xcode targets, a few mouse clicks away.
DTrace Probes
DTrace static probes have been added to the VM, providing the exact same support as MacRuby 0.4.
DTrace is a powerful tracing facility available since Leopard which allows you to trace the MacRuby runtime of any running application, in development or production.
MacRuby ships with a few DTrace example scripts. Here is one which prints some information regarding objects collected by the GC at a given time.
$ sudo dtrace -qs sample-macruby/DTrace/collected_objects64.d -p 72593
Target pid: 72593
^C
CLASS COUNT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
__NSFastEnumerationEnumerator 100
Method 101
CommonLogger 102
NSCFNumber 200
Proc 202
ByteString 203
CTParser 204
Time 204
NSCFCharacterSet 400
NSCheapMutableString 404
NSPathStore2 606
NSCFData 612
NSCFDictionary 1204
RubyArray 2434
NSCFString 21240