[jaegerpicker]

Personally I much prefer Ruby Motion to Xamarin. I like ruby more, it's a closer work flow to my standard python/django, Ruby/Rails based workflow (terminal and text editor based). Intellij provides a great ide (MUCH better than Xamarin studio, one of my least favorite IDE's all though visual studio is even better than intellij's offerings IMO). In version 3.0 they will offer Android support and at that point I think Ruby Motion will be the best native app option.

Almost forgot to mention that, all of the ruby is compiled down to actual Native obj-c runtime code. Great performance and look, as good as a regular Obj-C or Java app.

[mstromb]

If you prefer Ruby that's cool, but I feel like I should mention that Xamarin is also statically compiled on Apple platforms: http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/advanced_topics/limi...

In fact, every app in the Apple app store is statically compiled. App store guidelines prohibit dynamic code generation, preventing the use of a JIT compiler: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21689993/xamarin-ahead-of...

[declan]

Thanks! I wasn't aware of that announcement. Last month's blog post says: "If you have a RubyMotion app for iOS or OS X and want to port it to Android, you can even share some of the code." (http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/87048665656/rubymotion-3-0-s...)

I haven't used Ruby Motion myself -- do you know how much of the code can be reused excluding platform-specific UI stuff? There's a significant difference between 5% and 95%. :)

[revelation]

From the blog post, that seems like a rather perilous approach.. what are the chances they get all the builtin Ruby stuff to work the same way despite basing it on Java equivalents?

[jaegerpicker]

This is mostly true with Xamarin also, platform code is platform code. Most of your code sharing is business logic/accessing rest api's/core algorithms. UI/platform type of code is always going to be hard to port. That being said MacRuby (which is basically what Ruby motion is and JRuby (ruby on the jvm which I think the Android is based upon) are pretty close to source code compatible last I checked so I think it's likely a good chance.

[declan]

And what are the chances they get all the Android Ruby stuff to work perfectly in the initial release? As opposed to 6 months later after the bug fixes are deployed; hope you didn't have a release window for that fall 2014 app!

(Perhaps I'm overly cynical, though I've seen this before on other platforms.)

[jaegerpicker]

Actually I'd say pretty good as their software has been really high quality so far. That and the fact that JRuby already exists and I'm pretty sure thats the target runtime, a lot of their work is already pretty solid.