Phusion Blog

Bonjour les amis! My name is Jean Pierre Hernandez, I work at Phusion and indeed, am a direct relative of legendary super star disco god Patrick Hernandez.

Where Patrick was born to do disco, I was born to dabble in code, in particular with Cocoa. My brother would often use a cane to emphasize his graceful dance moves, and following suit, we’ll use Ruby to emphasize our élégance and love for fine Mac application development.

It brings me enormous joy to have you here on my blog, most likely resulting from a latent hate [[[towards] angular] brackets]. That’s okay, we’ve all been there, the important thing is we’ve found out that this torture is absolutement not necessary and that verbosity and masochism are still choices when it comes to developing delicious Mac applications. Not here however, as we’ll settle with no less than élégance and beauty! Painlessly incroyable indeed!

Before we’re able to start cooking on our first of many delicious Mac applications, we first need to set up the environment where all the magic happens.

As elegant and beautiful as MacRuby may appear to the developer, make no mistake, it’s also a beast when it comes to performance. Via techniques such as Just-in-Time (JIT) and ahead-of-time compilation, MacRuby applications can achieve performance comparable to native applications. Ahead-of-time compilation in particular is useful if you would like to keep your delicious mac recipes private to a larger extend.

In order to achieve all this goodness, MacRuby employs one of the most sophisticated compiler infrastructures at this moment in the form of LLVM. Depending on your needs and intentions with MacRuby you may want to choose to compile all these components from source by grabbing it from SVN or Git. Keep in mind that in the case of the latter, LLVM is still a moving target in terms of releases and is subjected to rapid API and feature changes. It is for this reason that MacRuby is forced to use specific builds as specified in the README.

Compiling LLVM and MacRuby from source can be quite time consuming and tedious. In particular, LLVM will take about 1 hour to compile utilizing both CPU cores on a unibody MacBook Pro. Luckily, our community is blessed with nice people who made sure we could also utilize already-compiled binaries and nightlies, the latter containing nightly edge builds of MacRuby. For the sake of stability, we’d recommend you to use the former instead.

Once you’ve installed these components, we can start cooking up our first cocoa application for the mac using Ruby, which is exciting indeed!