this would certainly be useful, but frankly i think that having proper debugger-integration support in xcode (see http://www.macruby.org/trac/ticket/1208 and issue 3037631 in http://bugreporter.apple.com) would go dramatically farther towards making macruby useful. edit-and-continue would be great, but setting a breakpoint: priceless. thx, n@
On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 8:22 AM, Matt Aimonetti <mattaimone...@gmail.com>wrote: > Very good point Jean Denis. You are totally right, it shouldn't be hard to > reload all the Ruby source while the code is running. One thing tho, you > might also have to reset the state of your application, including its > drawing state. But maybe we could leave that up to the developers. > What I'm thinking is to test this theory, we could write a small > application addon which adds an extra window calling into 2 methods: reload > and reset. > Reload would basically do rb_main.rb does, reset would reset the state of > the app after reloading the source files. > We should also be able to open a REPL window to introspect the code in > real time. I believe Alloy or Vincent were working on something similar. > > - Matt > > > On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 1:15 PM, Jean-Denis MUYS <jdm...@kleegroup.com>wrote: > >> Reading from many messages on this list, I get the impression that >> MacRuby users are more often than not Ruby programmers coming to Mac >> programming. >> >> I come from the opposite side: I am an experienced Cocoa developer and >> Ruby newbie. >> >> I came to MacRuby for one major reason (and perhaps a few secondary >> reasons): to speed up development of my Mac applications. >> >> My vision of speeding up Mac development is basically to finally reach >> again what I had almost 20 years ago when I was programming in Macintosh >> Common Lisp on the Mac for the Mac: developing within a running >> application, without having to quit it, dynamically adding or modifying >> classes or methods through a read-eval-print loop. >> >> Yet, after having read through Matt's book, this is not what I got. On >> the contrary, my workflow is at the opposite end of the spectrum: >> built-run-test-quit loop, similar to what I'm used to with Objective-C. >> Except it's even worse: at least, typos are caught early with Objective-C. >> With MacRuby, they aren't, and quite often, I spend a considerable time >> reaching the point I'm working on before I get an exception from my typo. >> >> Since MacRuby *does* have a REPL in the macirb terminal program, I really >> hope I missed something (that unfortunately is not described in Matt's >> book): what would be an efficient workflow developing a MacRuby Macintosh >> application with Xcode? >> >> For example, I see that all Ruby code is loaded in rb_main.rb by walking >> through the app bundle resource directory and calling require(path) on all >> found ruby files. >> >> Would it be possible to require again those files after they have been >> modified, without quitting the application? Yes it would still require >> building the app after each change in order to copy the changed ruby files >> back into the app bundle, but at least Xcode is happy to do so without >> requiring the app to quit (just don't ask it to "Run"). >> >> Even better, would it be possible to optionally require the ruby files >> from the source directory rather than from the app bundle (during >> development) based on some scheme or configuration dependent symbol? Then >> building the app would not even be necessary after changes limited to Ruby >> source code. >> >> I would envision MacRuby Xcode templates to include such improvements in >> rb_main.rb, and also to add a "Debug" menu of some sort to the built app >> from which the developer could select a command to reload any/all changed >> Ruby file. This could even be automated using File System events. >> >> The workflow loop would then become: >> >> 1- test some app action >> 2- notice a bug. Don't quit. Switch to Xcode. >> 3- change the relevant Ruby file >> 4- save >> 5- there is no step 5 >> >> I can't see any reason why this would not possible, and even easy, Ruby >> newbie as I may be. To me, this is the major MacRuby promise, and that >> promise is not kept yet. >> >> Am I out of my mind? >> >> Thanks. >> >> Jean-Denis >> >> (and add a Ruby console/listener to the built app too, in which the REPL >> is working in the context of the running app). >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 > >
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