Should I learn MacRuby or RubyCocoa

Question

I am wanting to learn mac development with ruby but I'm not sure which one to go at. RubyCocoa has been around longer but I think MacRuby will beat it out in the long run..

Any suggestions??

Answer 1

Go with MacRuby. It's the future :)

It's newer, way faster, and much better integrated. HotCocoa is awesome as well.

MacRuby is a Ruby VM implemented on top of Apple Technologies as opposed to a bridge like RubyCocoa. A Ruby String for example is an NSString by nature, instead of being bridged by the runtime. It's a much cleaner, faster and more solid approach. It's also developed and sponsored by Apple, which means it could become part of OS X at some point.

Also see this post: Why MacRuby Matters

Answer 2

RubyCocoa is more mature and better tested. MacRuby is simpler and better designed overall. MacRuby is also about as stable as a lawn chair sitting on a beachball. Seriously. It's definitely the one you want to use in the long run, but it isn't there yet. They're not so different that you'd have to "learn" one versus the other. They're both just Ruby with access to the Cocoa APIs. It's more about knowing the Cocoa APIs than anything else.

I would recommend learning Cocoa with Objective-C. Once you have a good grasp on the central concepts of the framework (which are all based on Objective-C), then you can use Ruby if you still want to.

Answer 3

Since Chuck replied to you, things changed quite a lot, MacRuby now uses LLVM, allows for AOT compilation and is quite stable and much faster than it used to be. The ruby side of things still need some work for be 100% compatible but as I'm writing this response, 0.5 is still in beta and you should see ruby libraries being compatible very quickly.