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by tptacek 6361 days ago
Obviously, you know this stuff better than I do (I've been following you for awhile), but for what it's worth, here are my initial reactions to your post:

(1) Ruby and ObjC have inconsistent syntax, which among other things is the reason we have that crappy snake-case encoding. This is true, but like I said, Cocoa's nomenclature is already so bad that wrapping everything in Ruby idiom was a win for me

(2) Ruby/Cocoa has to bridge Ruby types (Hash) to ObjC types (NSMutableDictionary). It's true, but this is only really painful if you're using the bridge "bidirectionally"; the real win is to stay in Ruby, and use Cocoa like a library, not a second programming environment.

(3) Ruby and ObjC have overlapping libraries, like ActiveRecord and Core Data (or a million smaller examples). With the exception of Core Data --- and in retrospect I wish I'd stuck with ActiveRecord --- I just stick with the Ruby side and use Cocoa only for appkit. Just like above.

(4) Ruby and ObjC are storing redundant objects. The bridge makes this transparent. If I cared about performance, I wouldn't be in Ruby at all.

(5) Ruby and ObjC have totally different memory management schemes. Part of the point of writing Ruby is not to have ObjC's memory management headache, which the bridge takes care of, but I admit that I could find out 6 months from now that that was a bad assumption.

(6) You can't call Ruby from multiple ObjC threads, or really using ObjC threading at all. That would be a problem if I was writing substantial amounts of ObjC code, but I'm not. (I'm also an async bigot, so I avoid threads anyways).

(7) If a Ruby name clashes with an ObjC name, you have to preface the ObjC name with oc_ to call it from Ruby. This does not bother me at all; isn't it exactly what you'd expect when merging two independent environments?

I'm sure this stuff kills you if you have a complicated ObjC/Cocoa application and you want to extend it with Ruby, or if you want to do a Tcl-style integration with Ruby glue code and ObjC engine code. Also, I am totally biased, because in my consulting life I've spent years in Ruby/DL and Win32 doing my own manual bridging and runtime code generation; Ruby/Cocoa is a dream for me. =)

Nu is really cool. But none of my code is written in Nu.
1 comments
timburks 6361 days ago
Yes, I agree with you on a lot of that, especially if you can write your entire app in Ruby. That hasn't been true for me though. Either I have to go to C for performance or there's some library that I want to use that's easier to use directly from C.

You'll probably want to switch to MacRuby. By this summer there should be lots of sample code.

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