MacRuby 0.4: Ruby support for Mac OS X

Version 0.4 of MacRuby has been released and includes several new features and bug fixes. MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby that has been ported to run on top of the Mac OS X core technologies, such as the Objective-C common runtime and garbage collector. A new feature in 0.4 is a Runtime Objective-C API that can be used to control the runtime from a pure Cocoa environment, which will help developers working on Objective-C Cocoa applications.

DTrace probes have been added to the interpreter to trace things, such as method calls or exceptions. HotCocoa has been improved since it was first implemented in the last release and features a new graphics layer called HotCocoa::Graphics. The graphics layer provides an object-oriented interface into Mac OS X's Core Graphics and Core Image drawing libraries.

MacRuby contains the Ruby 1.9.1 standard library and includes a new threaded garbage collector. The garbage collector now runs in a multi-threaded mode by default, preventing it from interrupting a program's flow and improving performance. The release includes full 32-bit and 64-bit support, meaning that if users have a 64-bit processor, MacRuby will benefit with a speed boost.

MacRuby requires Mac OS X 10.5.6, or later and is available now.

(crve)