MacRuby 0.5 adds HotCocoa support

Following two beta releases, the MacRuby developers have announced the availability of the final version of MacRuby 0.5. Version 0.5 of MacRuby is aimed at improving the overall performance of the Ruby port for Mac and includes a number of bug fixes and new features over the previous betas. It is also the first stable release to have the YARV byte code engine replaced with a new virtual machine.

The latest major release of MacRuby is now based on the open source Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), allowing both just-in-time and ahead-of-time compilers to be used, and once again adds support for HotCocoa, a Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks. MacRuby 0.5 features improvements to the macrubyc command-line tool that allow it to support the compilation of multiple Ruby source files into dynamic libraries and the interface with Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), part of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), aims to simplify threading. A separate Introduction to GDC with MacRuby is also provided. The developers note that, while they believe that "MacRuby is stable in a lot of areas", use for mainstream development is still not recommended.

More details about the release can be found in the release announcement and change log. MacRuby 0.5 is available to download (direct download) for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The developers advise Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) users wishing to use MacRuby to build the sources from the repository. Sources are released under the Ruby license. MacRuby is sponsored and developed by Apple, which also takes part in the development of LLVM.

(crve)