MacRuby 0.9 released

After more than two months of development following version 0.8, the MacRuby.org developers have announced the release of MacRuby 0.9. In the team's efforts towards building the first stable release, 1.0, this latest version of the Ruby variant built to run natively on Mac OS X focuses on stability and compatibility.

According to the developers, MacRuby 0.9 includes a number of stability fixes correcting crashers, memory leaks and race conditions, as well as several performance improvements. Other changes include enhancements to the macruby_deploy program to embed RubyGems (with dependencies) and BridgeSupport files, and the internal representation of strings has changed "from a dual binary / UTF-16 model to a pure binary one, principally to avoid problems in multithreaded applications". RubyGems, the popular Ruby package manager which became the official package manager in Ruby 1.9, has also been upgraded to version 1.4.2 – RubyGems 1.5.0 was released at the end of January.

The developers note that the latest version will only run on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard – previous versions of the operating system are no longer supported. Users running the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter. A final release date for MacRuby 1.0 has yet to be announced.

Further information about the release, including a full list of changes and bug fixes, can be found in a post on the MacRuby Blog and in the release notes. MacRuby 0.9 is available to download from the project's site, and documentation, including screencasts and tutorials, is provided. MacRuby source code is available under the Ruby Licence.

(crve)