ASS vs RubyCocoa vs MacRuby

Has anyone here been comparing the extent of functionality between ASS, RubyCocoa and MacRuby? All three allow development within XCode/Interface Builder, the latter two offer programming in the powerful object oriented Ruby language, but applescript seems to have the advantages of 1) compile-time error checking to help identify problems 2) the huge resources of his site for examples 3) sometimes less convoluted ways of referring to Cocoa objects.

I have invested some time into my ASS application already but I am getting more and more frustrated with the applescript language and have begun to spend some serious time learning Ruby. However, I worry that RubyCocoa and the new MacRuby ways of doing Cocoa programming are still somewhat “half-baked” and may still have limited functionality.

Has anyone here had much experience with this? Perhaps we could discuss it in this thread?

I have written a couple of apps using RubyCocoa. Nothing too complicated though.

I am not sure what the limitations of RubyCocoa are but it appears MacRuby is attempting to eliminate them. There are a lot of debates on whether Ruby will every be an equal choice along side Obj-C.

Laurent Sansonetti, software engineer for Apple who maintains the entire Ruby layer for OS X, is very optimistic this will one day be the case.

On his website here is how the links look for the two; RubyCocoa and MacRuby.
MacRuby (a version of Ruby that runs on top of Objective-C) ;
RubyCocoa (a Ruby/Objective-C bridge) ;

There also an interesting article at Theococoa although it is from Feb of 2007.

From all that I have read it appears that MacRuby is getting the big push from Apple. It’s syntax is more like Obj-C than RubyCoca but that is a strength not a weakness.

With MacRuby we will be able to tap all that Obj-C has to offer as well as the simplicity of and elegance of Ruby. Seems like a win-win to me.

Regards,

Craig