Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby

New ADC article introducing MacRuby, Apple’s in-progress project for writing Cocoa applications in Ruby. What makes MacRuby different than the RubyCocoa bridge is that MacRuby is an implementation of the Ruby language built on the existing Cocoa runtime:

More specifically, MacRuby’s fundamental data types such as String, Array, and Hash are re-implemented on top of their CoreFoundation counterparts (CFString, CFArray and CFDictionary, respectively). All strings created in MacRuby are native Cocoa strings and can be passed to underlying C or Objective-C APIs that expect a Cocoa object, no conversion occurs. This implementation detail also implies that strings in MacRuby are UTF-16 compliant by default.

Monday, 20 October 2008