About a year ago, I started an experiment. Could Ruby developers build cross-platform mobile and desktop applications using only Ruby? Today, Ruflet reached an important milestone. Ruflet Explorer, the runtime application for Ruflet, has successfully passed Apple’s App Review and is now available on the App Store. What started as an experiment has grown into a framework and tooling ecosystem for building applications in pure Ruby. No Dart. No Kotlin. No Swift. No JavaScript. Just Ruby. A year ago, Ruflet was an idea. Today, anyone can download Ruflet Explorer and start experimenting with Ruby-powered applications on real devices. This is only the beginning. github.com/AdamMusa/Ruflet Try Ruflet Explorer on the App Store apps.apple.com/us/app/ruflet… @evilmartians @rails @ruby_african @RubyMotion @shortrubynews @fletdev @FlutterDev

これは「RubyMotion」という昔のシステムで実装されているのですが、Swiftで今風に作りなおしてもらえると嬉しいです... ...てClaudeに頼んだら一発なのかな?

mruby is incredibly fast, and the entire VM is only about 25 KB. I’ve compiled it and embedded it inside Flutter, and it loads almost instantly while delivering amazing performance. A lot of older OSS projects tried to bring Ruby to mobile, but the results were honestly very poor RubyMotion, for example, feels outdated and extremely slow. With mruby, the runtime runs synchronously and at just 25 KB it barely affects the app bundle size. The result is essentially a truly native app experience. I’ll keep you updated once I polish a ready version for testing. @bastos @karanjagtiani04

I still think it’s prettier than anything we have today … RN, Swift UI, Flutter … this was peak iOS dev for me I think. Too bad RubyMotion tanked in 2015.

I wrote fully native iOS apps for a while using RubyMotion, 2012-2015. That was probably the most fun I ever had coding.

PerlMotion、そもそもMacRubyとRubyMotionというものがあってじゃな… というところから始めないと概念が伝わらないかもしれない #oss4fun.42 rubymotion.com/about/

This was a bit of a battle in the early days of Rubymotion. People benchmarked it compared to Swift and complained that it was slower, but the benchmarks were meaningless for the vast number of use cases. Nobody benchmarked how much more productive developers were when using it, compared to alternatives.

btw, the only two viable options for cross-platform apps are React Native and Web. Kotlin Multiplatform still does not feel mature at all in 2024. disclaimer: long time xplat dev since 10 years ago (like RubyMotion / Xamarin age)

2000年代初めにAppleでMacRubyを作ったあと独立してRubyMotionをやったLaurent氏、その後MSを経てAppleに戻ってiWorkチームでWasm関連の仕事をしたあと、2022からはNvidiaでOmniverseの仕事をやってるらしい。 Omnvirseが何なのかは知らないけど…。 hipbyte.com/~lrz/

RubyMotionを知っている人が何人かいて驚いた( ˘ω˘)

rebuild.fm のLaurent Sansonettiさんの回 (121回) が好きです。2015年12月。3回聴きました。RubyMotionの作者Laurent さんがRuby Kaigi で表彰されたとき(?)。プログラマのための道具づくりを肩肘張らずにすばらしいセンスで進められているように感じました。 overcast.fm/ mfIXkr4

突然RubyMotionのことを思い出したのだけど、RubyMotionの公式見に行ったらlatest newsの日付が2020とかになってて一抹の寂しさを覚えた

This is the closest thing I’ve seen to the experience I had with RubyMotion back in the day, so far.

I'm just here waiting for more Rubymotion content... (Kidding 🙃)

This is actually a good question (quoted below), and I have a good answer for it. I was an iOS native dev from 2012-2015 (Obj-C days) and really, really loved it. Xcode was annoying but I could get around that with various tooling (RubyMotion, cocoapods, etc) that made it so I could be in Xcode less. And I shipped native binaries. I had no intention of changing. But I run a consultancy, and my clients increasingly started asking me for Android versions as well — their users were demanding it. So I started learning Android development in 2014-2015. The problem was that my team was clearly going to have to go through a transformation: 1. I’d have to double the size of the mobile team 2. Half would be iOS, half Android 3. We were still doing web at the time, so I’d have a whole other separate team doing web 4. The costs would go up tremendously — good for me, but bad for my clients In 2015 I was also preparing to merge my company with another company to become the new Infinite Red. As we were doing our due diligence, we realized both of our teams were facing this same potential issue. And with the doubled team size, it was now magnified. Because of this, my cofounder @twerth started researching alternatives in September 2015. We had heard of React Native but our assumption at the time was that it wasn’t good enough to deliver the level of user experience that we were used to. But his evaluation when he came back was “This is actually quite good.” (Remember, early days for RN! But he saw where it was going.) The primary reason it made sense was from a business standpoint. We could use the same team for all three platforms and share code, devs, training, tooling, and more. We could ship apps for about 60% of the cost (half the time with iOS plus a bit to tweak for Android). This is by far the biggest reason. But the second reason was technical. React Native is native, and the JS layer is just orchestrating UIViews and Android native views via React’s brilliant “UI as a function of state” paradigm. That meant views take up the same amount of memory as native (because they literally are native) and feel and look native to the user. With that decision made, we converted two native projects that were just kicking off to React Native and have been focused on that from then on. Now, what about personally? Truth be told, I still like iOS native dev the best. Swift is cool, and the SwiftUI declarative UI system (stolen shamelessly from React) is a good improvement over previous interface builder and xibs and programmatically / imperatively built UIs. If I was an individual dev, I’d probably lean that direction. But I’m not, and there’s almost no business case for doing native mobile dev these days when React Native exists. It’s plenty good enough in most ways and even superior in a few ways — the third party ecosystem is vast, libraries like Reanimated and Vision Camera have no equal in native land, etc. That’s why I use React Native. It is a native app in the end, just running Hermes with some bytecode to orchestrate the native UI. And I still enjoy it 8 years later!

知らなかったんだけどRubyMotionっていうのを使えばRubyでネイティブアプリ開発ができるらしい ただ無料だと対応OSのバージョンがちょっと古かったりするみたい rubymotion.com/jp/

え？ RubyMotion なんて知らん😖 と思ったら Android のサポートが 5 までだし、昔にあったクロスプラットフォームなのね😅 サイト内に開発終了の案内もないし、フェードアウトしたのだろうか。クロスプラットフォームっていつかこういう末路を辿るのか😱 rubymotion.com/jp/tour/featu…

A very naive question, and a long shot but maybe someone knows the answer (or the way to it): Does RubyMotion have an interface for DRb? Or in other words: Can I - theoretically - set up a client/server interaction from one iPhone to another? github.com/ruby/drb

2 sets of 50 programming languages 1. Python 2. JavaScript 3. Java 4. C 5. C# 6. Ruby 7. Swift 8. PHP 9. Go 10. Rust 11. TypeScript 12. Kotlin 13. R 14. MATLAB 15. Perl 16. Objective-C 17. Scala 18. Groovy 19. Lua 20. Haskell 21. Julia 22. Shell scripting (e.g., Bash) 23. HTML/CSS (markup languages) 24. SQL 25. Assembly language 26. Dart 27. Cobol 28. Fortran 29. Lisp 30. Prolog 31. Ada 32. Erlang 33. Tcl 34. F# 35. Smalltalk 36. Scheme 37. PL/SQL 38. PowerShell 39. Crystal 40. Elixir 41. CoffeeScript 42. Verilog 43. VHDL 44. Groovy 45. COBOL 46. Dart 47. Lua 48. Objective-J 49. PureScript 50. ReasonML 1. AdaScript 2. APL 3. AutoHotkey 4. AWK 5. B 6. Boo 7. Ceylon 8. Chapel 9. Clojure 10. COBOLScript 11. D 12. Eiffel 13. Elm 14. Factor 15. Fantom 16. Forth 17. Frege 18. Hack 19. Icon 20. Io 21. J 22. JScript 23. K 24. LabVIEW 25. LiveScript 26. Logtalk 27. Mathematica 28. Nim 29. OCaml 30. Oz 31. Pike 32. PostScript 33. Pure Data 34. PureBasic 35. Racket 36. REBOL 37. RubyMotion 38. S 39. SAS 40. Scratch 41. Self 42. Shen 43. Solidity 44. SuperCollider 45. Tcl/Tk 46. Unison 47. Vala 48. VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) 49. WebAssembly (Wasm) 50. Xtend

11 years ago today I created my first commit for what became one of my most well-loved open source creations, ProMotion. It let you write ideomatic Ruby and create iPhone apps (via RubyMotion). We still haven't gotten back to this nice of a developer experience, over a decade later, in my opinion.