After 2 weeks since the project was officially introduced, the first version of MacRuby has just been released. The announcement is available here.
Many bugs were fixed (those entered in the tracker are here), and features were added too, enough of them to be able to run a few nice samples.
Even if the project is still experimental, it's an important release because I expect to receive feedback regarding the design of some features, more specifically keyed arguments, which could eventually inspire Matz for the design of Ruby 2.0.
The implementation will significantly change in the next release, starting with a re-implementation of the String, Array and Hash classes using CoreFoundation. It will be challenging to be as compatible as possible with the original implementation. Besides the fact that we will be only one implementation for these primitive classes, allowing MacRuby to exchange them between both languages without having to perform any conversion, I also have the feeling that the new implementation might perform better too, in some use-cases.
I would also want to switch to the Objective-C dispatcher entierely, which would eliminate the need of injecting closures in YARV to call Objective-C methods (as well as addressing an annoying problem).
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