The MacRuby Blog

A new development preview version of the BridgeSupport project, now based on the clang/LLVM compiler framework, is available for testing!

You can grab it from here.

As a remainder, only MacRuby 0.7.1 or later will support the new BridgeSupport.

This second development preview release fixes several bugs that have been discovered in Preview 1.

Please help us by installing this preview, and let us know if you find any problem!

We are glad to announce the release of MacRuby 0.8, after two months and a half of development since the previous version.

This release focuses on stability and compatibility. Users of MacRuby are encouraged to upgrade.

You can download it from here. Please note that this package only runs on Snow Leopard (10.6) or later. Older Mac OS X versions are no longer supported.

Please give it a try and let us know of any problems you find!

The complete release notes are available.

Converging for 1.0

The MacRuby team is now converging all its efforts into the delivery of MacRuby’s first stable release, 1.0.

We intend to deliver starting from now releases much more frequently than before. We hope that users will then test MacRuby more frequently, and as such, report more bugs.

However, we do not expect further releases to introduce significant features, as we are now focusing on stability and compatibility issues.

The tickets in our tracker have recently been triaged into two piles: those needed for 1.0 and those which will be addressed in later releases.

We will organize bug smashes in order to collectively reduce the 1.0 tickets. The very first one was organized a couple weeks ago and was a success, as we were able to sort and reduce most of our tickets. We will likely start fixing bugs for real in the second one, which will be announced on the mailing-list soon. Stay tuned!

A new development version of the BridgeSupport project, now based on the clang/LLVM compiler framework, is available for testing!

You can grab it from here.

If you intend to use it from MacRuby, you will have to install MacRuby 0.7.1, a minor release containing support for this new BridgeSupport, which can be found here.

What is BridgeSupport?

BridgeSupport files are XML files that describe the API symbols of frameworks or libraries that cannot be introspected at runtime. These are generally ANSI C symbols that are non-object-oriented items such as constants, enumerations, structures, and functions but can also include some additional information about classes, methods, and informal protocols.

BridgeSupport files are a major component of the Objective-C bridges (RubyCocoa, PyObjC) and languages (MacRuby) which permit Cocoa development.

BridgeSupport also comes with a command-line utility, called gen_bridge_metadata, which allows you to generate BridgeSupport files for 3rd party frameworks or libraries.

BridgeSupport is a technology included in Mac OS X since version 10.5, Leopard.

What is new?

In this preview release, the BridgeSupport metadata generator has been rewritten on top of the clang/LLVM compiler framework. It now generates more accurate metadata from header files, and it performs significantly faster and is more stable.

It also annotates new API constructs such as C-level blocks.

Additionally, all system frameworks are now covered by BridgeSupport. Prior to this release, only selected public frameworks were covered.

Help!

Please help us identifying possible problems by installing this preview release and resuming the development of your MacRuby application. You can also now access APIs dealing with C-level blocks, which wasn’t possible before.

Give it a try and let us know if you find any problem.