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Hopefully Apple does include MacRuby pre-installed. I just wrapped up a MacRuby app. MacRuby is a very cool system. However, if you are distributing the app, y
by rdouble 16y ago
Hopefully Apple does include MacRuby pre-installed.
I just wrapped up a MacRuby app. MacRuby is a very cool system. However, if you are distributing the app, you either have to include all of MacRuby, or go through a complicated and error-prone process of excluding portions of the stdlib. This is a black art at the moment.
Even without most of the stdlib, the bundled app is much larger than the equivalent Cocoa app.
The larger app size could become a concern on machines like the Air with smaller SSDs. It also seems tasteless to have multiple apps each with their own MacRuby distro bundled up with the app. A pre-installed MacRuby would solve both of these problems. Then again, it would also make creating Mac apps almost too easy... how will I compete?
- oomkiller 16y agoWhat kind of package size are we talking here? I see MacRuby is 30MB, surely the whole thing isnot required.
- rdouble 16y agoYes, the whole thing is required. In fact, my app is 34MB, the majority of which is MacRuby + the stdlib. I cobbled together a process using information found on a number of blog posts and mailing list archives which let me exclude the parts of the stdlib I wasn't using. This got the file size down to 14MB. However, I don't have any QA resources so I'm not sure if this has introduced any instability in the app. In contrast, the pure Cocoa version of this app is 4.5MB.
- maercsrats 16y agoI think the newer version of macruby, with greater bridgesupport, should help this out: http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/10/08/bridgesupport-preview.html http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/10/08/bridgesupport-preview...
- petercooper 16y agoWhen I'm installing even reasonably simple Mac apps, I often see the progress bar talking about sizes in the mid double digits. This sucks but is common.
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoWhy does this matter?
- Dornkirk 16y agoIf Lion came with MacRuby installed on it you wouldn't need to bundle MacRuby to distrubte the app ... for Lion users? But what about for those of us who are on Leopard/Snow Leopard (or Tiger for that matter) - while Apple users seem to adopt the newer tech much quicker than others it still seems like you'd be cutting out a large group of potential customers/users.