MacRuby » MacRuby 0.5 beta 1
The new MacRuby 0.5 runtime is built upon LLVM, a compiler infrastructure also sponsored by Apple. Thanks to LLVM, MacRuby is able to transform the Ruby abstract syntax tree (AST) from the parser directly into highly optimized machine code. MacRuby supports both Just in Time (JIT) and Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation. The JIT mode will compile down the code at runtime, and the AOT mode will allow you to save on disk the compilation result. AOT compilation makes MacRuby a true Ruby compiler.
I'm excited about the prospect of building cocoa apps in Ruby, and compiling everything down to objects. What's better than that? Well, they've fixed the concurrent performance of Ruby by sharding the global interpreter lock, and they threw in GCD for good measure. I believe developments like this herald the end of C/C++ hegemony. At some point in the near future, this will be the default method of building apps on OS X.
