Hi Ryan, As Jordan mentioned, the debugger is alpha quality :) It should be able to debug Xcode apps assuming you tweak a few things out, but not out of the box, I'm afraid. Also, the code has been neglected a bit as we have been working on other things. If you file a ticket we will try to get things better in the upcoming release. We could then document the process in a short tutorial on the website.
Laurent On Nov 21, 2010, at 3:49 PM, Ryan Porter wrote: > Hello, and thank you very much to the developers of MacRuby. It's an amazing > technology and I hope to see it continue to grow. > > I've managed to figure out, after an hour or two of wasted time, that > although MacRuby now includes a debugger, that debugger can't be used to > debug a MacRuby Cocoa app. Not only through XCode, but at all. Is that > correct? The release notes proudly announce that MacRuby now includes a > debugger but they neglect to mention how to use it. After some research I > eventually discovered that there is no way to use the debugger to debug a > Cocoa app. > > If that's true, then lack of a debugger eliminates any benefit that using > Ruby could bring to the Cocoa experience. Objective C syntax is truly nasty, > but if there is no debugger available for Cocoa apps written with MacRuby > then it just doesn't make sense to use Ruby to make a Cocoa app. Especially > with Objective C 2.0's simplified syntax and garbage collection. "You don't > need a debugger for Ruby code", is simply not a realistic solution. TDD and > BDD tools for desktop Cocoa apps are still inadequate, and even with TDD you > often still need a debugger. > > MacRuby isn't going to go very far if developers are forced to revert to > printf debugging to build Cocoa apps. I don't mind if the debugger doesn't > have slick XCode integration like GDB. But there needs to be SOME way to > debug a Cocoa app or else the sensible path for developer productivity on the > Mac will be Objective C 2.0 instead of MacRuby. Sacrificing any hope of > using a debugger to gain relatively minor syntactic improvements is not a > tradeoff that makes any sense. I don't intend to disparage MacRuby, I just > want to share my perspective as both a professional Rubyist and a > professional Cocoa developer. MacRuby is an amazing technology, but to gain > traction as a realistic way to build Cocoa apps it will really need a > debugger that works with Cocoa apps. > > -- > Ryan > > _______________________________________________ > MacRuby-devel mailing list > MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org > http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
_______________________________________________ MacRuby-devel mailing list MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
