Compiling Ruby to machine language

IIRC MacRuby used to compile to native code on OSX using LLVM, and was supposed to support native OSX APIs and Objective-C frameworks. It always seemed like a neat idea, and a slick integration, but I guess Apple moved to Swift instead.

I'll have to pick up a copy of this "Ruby Under a Microscope" book when the new version comes out. I've always liked Ruby, I just haven't had much chance to use it.

Typical. I may get absolutely destroyed for this, but being professionally proficient in a ton of languages, including Ruby and the ones I mention below, and the ones I'm about to mention:

This sounds like Microsoft when they moved from VB6 to VB.Net. At least they have a good thing going with C# though.

VB6 was quite an interesting beast. You could do basically everything that you could do in languages like C/C++, but in most cases, you could churn out code quicker. This even extended to DirectX/Direct3D! For Web pages? ASP Classic.

The tl;dr is that I really wish that ease of development were prioritized along with everything else. One of the reasons I like Ruby is the elegance of the language and ease of using it.

Note that I've been using it since the mid 2000s or so, but not exclusively (both it and VB6 defined my career, however). C# is my second most favorite.

If Ruby had the GUI design tools VB6 had, it would be interesting to look at the popularity stats

Anyway, I'm rambling, so there is that. ;)

What about something like Shoes[1]? I have played with it a little, just to make a simple UI to run some scripts I can run fine in a shell myself, but less-technical people may be too scared to fire up Terminal.app in order to do the same...

1: http://shoesrb.com/

VB6 deserves the huge popularity it had, but the reason wasn't because of the language design, rather, its (extremely) rapid GUI application development. It was actually a two-edged sword - it facilitated writing spaghetti code.

> You could do basically everything that you could do in languages like C/C++

As long as there is some form of memory access, any language can do basically everything that one can do in C/C++, but this doesn't make much sense.

Shoes was very limited, and could only be used for extremely simple applications.

> As long as there is some form of memory access, any language can do basically everything that one can do in C/C++, but this doesn't make much sense.

No VB6 had really easy COM integration which let you tap into a lot of Windows system components. The same code in C++ often required hundreds of lines of scaffolding, and I'm not exaggerating

AFAIK, you can still use Objective-C and create apps for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS? The APIs previously used may not be available anymore.

I don't think it was too similar, TBH. Apple never took MacRuby as seriously as Microsoft took VB6, and it hadn't even had a 1.0 release when the single developer left Apple to work on RubyMotion.

I do agree it'd be interesting to have a GUI designer for Ruby. Does QML paired with QtRuby work?

In the distant past I had a book about FXRuby, but never used it much, and don't think it had a UI designer - it was just bindings to Fox Toolkit, which is lightweight, but not as well maintained as Qt or Gtk.

I'm sure you can still use Objective-C, but MacRuby stopped being updated around 2011, and I don't know how well it'd support newer versions of OSX.

I dropped OSX long ago, so can't even try it out any more.

I wonder how much of the LLVM bits could be reused? I'm sure LLVM's changed a bunch in the last 15 years, too.

FWIW, the pywin32 Python package and win32ole Ruby package have streamlined COM integration for Python and Ruby. Not quite as easy as VB6, but it's pretty close. I was even able to tab complete COM names in the Emacs Python REPL, but I remember it being a little buggy.

Typical? Of whom?

You might get destroyed for this? Why?

I don’t know what either of those mean in this context, and I used VB6 for a couple years at least and have been programming ObjC and / or Swift since 2006, with some time in Rails over a couple years.

I’m extremely confused by your comment, it’s apparently near verboten in polite company, yet, manages to say nothing other than that while invoking several things of which I’m quite familiar.

If you are destroyed, I anticipate it will be for a quarter baked, horrible, analogy between ObjC/Swift (or is it Ruby/Swift)? and VB6/VB.NET that somehow has something to do with Ruby.

My understanding is that MacRuby relied on Apple's ill-fated attempts to migrate from reference counting to regular garbage collection. I would be surprised if GC still worked on modern arm64 macOS. RubyMotion later adopted ARC but then it's not really Ruby anymore.

> At least they have a good thing going with C# though.

F# is pretty well-liked, too, isn't it?

I think you misunderstood the comment. They were referring to Ruby and accessing the APIs.

The creator of MacRuby left Apple, and created RubyMotion. It's continued by different people, but still around, though it seems the main focus of the people involved now is DragonRuby (a game-focused Ruby implementation)

It lives on as RubyMotion after the author left Apple, http://www.rubymotion.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubyMotion

By .NET 2.0, VB.NET got most of the stuff back VB 6 folks complained about.

Now what .NET never did as good as VB 6, was ease of COM development experience.

Which given the role of COM in Windows APIs since Vista, is a major pain point as I don't get if COM is so relevant, why Microsoft teams keep rebooting, badly, the COM development experience.

It probably still sucks in C, but the C++ DX got a lot better. Importing the idl would generate wrapper functions that made calling code look much more like a normal function. It would check the hresult and return an out param from the function. They also introduced types like _variant_t that help boxing and unboxing native types. It still wasn't fun but it greatly reduced line count.

Nah, unless talking about C++ Builder extensions for COM, in Visual C++ land it still sucks big time.

For some reason, there are vocal teams at Microsoft that resist anything in C++ that is comparable to VB, Delphi, .NET, C++ Builder ease of use regarding COM.

Hence why we got MFC COM, ATL COM, WRL, WinRT (as COM evolution), C++/CX, C++/WinRT, WIL, and eventually all of them lose traction with that vocal group that aparently rather use COM with bare bones IDL files, using the command line and VI on Windows most likely.

Windows has a COM system. VB6 isn’t special. You can do that with VB.Net or C# too, C and C++. Windows COM is a thing. VB6 COM isn’t as VB6 only hooked into windows COM.

I'm just giving context as to why VB6 was much better than C++ back in the day for building windows apps. VB.Net and C# didn't exist in the halcyon days of 1998

Gees, I forgot about their move to Arm. Almost certainly wouldn't work out of the box any more.