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Comment by sjtgraham | Hacker News Reader

I just have a gut feeling that Ruby will be a significant language for iOS/OS X development going forward. I really hope so anyway, even in its present state MacRuby is insanely fast against any other Ruby implementation. With the the resources of Apple behind it, the Ruby VM ecosystem will benefit greatly from thing like AOT MacRuby is bringing into the game.

I've looked on with envy at how Node.js is getting such a boost by leveraging a component of a heavily developed consumer product. Node.js gets such incredible performance for free because of the JS VM arms race. If Ruby has the weight of a giant behind it, hopefully it will experience a similar wave. IMO Ruby is a lot better suited to async programming than JS, as it has fibers for example, making it easy to untangle the nested, continuation passing style of async code.

Ruby is such a beautiful, productive language, it really deserves a giant like Apple throwing their weight behind it.

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Lets just hope it doesn't turn into another JScript or MSJVM,

I agree, and I think MacRuby is a great idea. Ruby in particular is very close to Objective-C in practice, and some of the latest Apple's changes to Objective-C have made it even more so.

But as much as I love Ruby, MacRuby is still not that much faster than Ruby and often it is slower [1]. But that said I am not bashing MacRuby: it is still a very young project and it has a lot of potential still untapped.

[1] http://programmingzen.com/2010/05/16/benchmarking-macruby-0-...

"If Ruby has the weight of a giant behind it, hopefully it will experience a similar wave."

I take it you didn't consider Sun a giant?

Sun was all about Java and I think it's disingenuous to say that Sun ever threw any significant effort into JRuby further than seeing JRuby as a way to assimilate Ruby into the Java Borg.

I have no idea what Sun's motivations were (and I doubt you do, either), but all the time I've been using JRuby I never got the sense there was anything going on that was designed to hook people into Java other than using the JVM.

There was no more assimilation going on than what I would expect to see from Apple and MacRuby. Less, perhaps, since JRuby apps run on multiple platforms, something MacRuby apps won't do.

And since JRuby itself was nothing more than a jar, developers could slip it into their usual Java environment without having to explain how or why they were installing Ruby.

I've sat in JUG meetings watching JRuby explained to Java fans, and each time they crowd goes from notable skepticism to smiles and head-nodding when they see what they can do.

Sun's support of Charlie, Tom, et al really helped get JRuby up to speed making it not only the fastest complete Ruby implementation but also acceptable to "the enterprise".

Sun may have been all about Java, but to the extent they helped JRuby they've enabled many Java devs to be all about Ruby.

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