MacRuby 0.6 arrives

The MacRuby developers have announced the availability of MacRuby 0.6, the latest version of their Ruby implementation which is tightly integrated with Mac OS X and Cocoa. The new version has been marked as "Stable for Cocoa Development" by the developers who have spent the last three months improving the overall stability, adding new features and working with early adopters to find and fix bugs. The previous version of MacRuby moved to an LLVM based implementation.

New features in MacRuby 0.6 include experimental support for debugging in the compiler and VM, new Hash, String and Regexp classes, experimental support for MRI C Extensions and a rewritten Foundations layer which better conforms to Ruby semantics. The MRI C Extensions support has allowed the developers to use the Nokogiri, SQLite3 and PostgreSQL extensions from within MacRuby. The new Regexp class is completely rewritten and is now thread-safe. Other improvements include improved bindings to Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) for concurrent programming. The developers say that MacRuby 0.6 passes about 85% of the RubySpecs tests.

Release notes for the new release detail all the changes. Ruby licensed source code is available to download, as is an executable binary version. MacRuby only supports Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) running on Intel based systems.

See also:

• MacRuby 0.5 adds HotCocoa support
• MacRuby 0.5 - Now with LLVM
  

(djwm)