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I have been messing around with ruby on rails. But my questions is really simple. Is ruby used language used for desktop applications? I mean without Rails? Can it be combined with GUI packages and Graphics Libraries to create a game for example? I have read that ruby is based on C. So it will be fast right?
Is ruby used language used for desktop applications?
Yes it is.
I mean without Rails?
Yes.
Can it be combined with GUI packages and Graphics Libraries to create a game for example?
Yes it can be.
I have read that ruby is based on C. So it will be fast right?
No, it won't be "fast" in the same way C is fast, because that isn't the point of Ruby. Ruby isn't "based on" C in any sense. The interpreter which runs Ruby code may be written in C (there are many interpreters and not all of them are), but that has nothing to do with the language itself. C and Ruby are not really comparable and occupy completely different niches.
I've no experience in programs where speed is critical; however, from my experience, Ruby is fast enough for user applications with GUI, and differences are almost unnoticeable from other similar dynamical languages (Ruby 1.9 is even faster, sometimes).
There is a reason I don't name the "similar languages": I think languages benchmarks aren't useful at all. While the fact that Ruby is fast enough for general purpose programming will probably make you happy, I think it's more important that if you already know and like Ruby you will be more productive using it.
There are some limit cases Ruby will be even faster than C: your implementations in C for functions that are offered as methods in the Ruby core lang and std lib could be slower than the ones in Ruby VM. This is just to say, speed isn't usually a concern, unless you're actually well aware of a particular reason you should be concerned with speed.
Some nice GUI libraries are FXRuby and Shoes, a very easy library used in the Hackety Hack project to teach children to program.
I usually use Tk when programming with Ruby and Python because it's included in the standard library and there is no need to install anything else.
For Gaming, you can try Gosu and Chingu; Gosu is probably the most actively developed Ruby Gaming Library, and Chingu is a nice collection of classes based on the foundations offered by Gosu. They've not got the nice community of other gaming libraries (e.g. Pygame) but you can easily start making little games with them.
Check out the Shoes GUI, it has different implementations, each one has a colorname, the most popular ared Red and Green Shoes, they are often used to make the kind of games you see also in Flash or regular javascript. They are fast enough for that kind of games. Some implementations even work with JRuby.
Red Shoes
Green Shows
Ruby is a language whose common implementation (e.g. ruby-1.9.3-pl94) is an interpreter coded in C. File main.c contains the main function in C which set up the Ruby VM implemented in C in file vm.c.
You could have several implementations of Ruby. I heard that some people wanted to re-implement Ruby above the Parrot VM (itself implemented in C); but that effort is perhaps still in progress. JRuby is a Ruby above the JVM.
Indeed interpreter vs compiler is not a sharp difference. Many interpreters contain a virtual machine with a translator (which you could view as a compiler) to that VM. Some VM implementations have a Just In Time dynamic translator to machine code. The JIT part produces machine code dynamically.
You could code a graphical application using e.g. Ruby-Gnome, a glue to Gnome and Gtk. You could also use Ruby Qt, a glue to KDE and Qt
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Is Ruby a good option for writing (possibly and partially) platform independent desktop applications?
Is there any supported libraries to write code for windows,Linux, Mac Operating systems
I know Java have capabilities to write desktop applications, what about Ruby?
Ruby is a great language, but support for building graphical desktop applications is a bit weak. I would probably use JRuby + your Java GUI library of choice.
I believe JRuby can be pre-compiled to Java bytecode, which might also be a little bit better for closed-source applications than plain-text Ruby. (Although Java bytecode can easily be reverse-compiled.)
The problem with multi-platform GUI libraries is that they look ugly in any platform.
As a OSX user if I see a Java or X interface I automatically and mentally assign 10 less points to the quality of this application, even if it doesn't deserve it.
There is only one multi-platform GUI library that doesn't trigger any of my mental prejudices: HTML5. But of course you can not access to the native OS API.
I would recommend to try to define the architecture of your application is such a way that the 90% of the code is visualization agnostic. And then build this 10% of visualization layer for any platform adhoc.
If you are not worry about the professional perception of your app I can say that any of the propositions that have been done are a good choose.
I'd suggest you to take a look at Shoes.
Whether its a good option or not is a debate that depends on your constraints and preferences. If you are more comfortable with programming in Ruby as opposed to Java or C# then I'd definitely consider it to be a good option.
It depends on what kind of app you are developping. I would not say ruby is that cross plateforme for apps that need a complex gui for instance. Python seems a little bit more X-platform from my experience ,Java is definetly. And why not try C++ and Qt ?
http://qt.nokia.com/products/
Edit : since the question was edited , i would add go either with Java or Qt more than Ruby.
You could try FXRuby, it's based on the FOX Toolkit library and allows for cross-platform Ruby GUI development. Even more exotic platforms like FreeBSD are supported. You can package your Application together with a Ruby interpreter and all required frameworks to minimize target platform dependencies.
IMHO Ruby is a great choice for cross-platform GUIs. However, it depends on what GUI toolkit you use. The tools are: Qt, Tk, wxRuby, Shoes, GTK etc. I chose GTK because you can use the Glade interface designer to build your forms. You can see several examples of GUIs build with ruby at:
http://www.visualruby.net
About the programs' appearance, I've tried my programs on Ubuntu, Win7 and Win XP, and everything looks perfect. Also, if you look at Tks website, they have screenshots of TK GUIs in various platforms, and they look fantastic too.
The major benefit to writing GUIs in ruby, is that you get to use ruby instead of java. Personally, I find ruby a joy to work with. Good Luck.
I believe it can be with TideSDK. I recently discovered this and it seems to the one of the best approaches for multi-platform gui I have seen. It does use HTML5, but it has support for things like system tray and other native behavior.
I have looked into a bunch of the other alleged cross-platform solutions, but I don't find them appealing.
One note about TideSDK today: It only supports Ruby 1.8.7. This is actually a big issue for me as many of the gems I want to use is 1.9.2+. The TideSDK deployed on linux is 1.9, but not osx or windows, they are on 1.8.7. This is something they hopefully will update soon. Would love to see multiple ruby versions.
Anyways. Have a look at it. It is open source also, aka. free, so that is nice.
Could anyone here tell me the difference between the Ruby gems rubysdl and ruby-sdl-ffi, like speed variances? If so, which would you prefer? I'm wondering for the sake of my gem that I'm writing, Rubydraw (located here).
Thanks in advance!
I am the author of ruby-sdl-ffi. This question was brought to my attention today, so I am answering for the benefit of anyone who is still curious.
The main difference is that ruby-sdl-ffi is pure Ruby code that accesses SDL (and related libraries) via FFI (foreign function interface), whereas rubysdl is an extension written in C that links to SDL (and related libraries). There are pros and cons to each approach. (Obviously, I feel that FFI is the better approach, or I would not have bothered to write ruby-sdl-ffi.)
Both libraries offer similar feature sets, although there are some differences (noted below). They can both do 2D games with images, sounds/music, and user input from keyboard, mouse, and/or joystick/gamepad. They can also both be used with OpenGL (via ruby-opengl or ffi-opengl) to create hardware-accelerated 3D games. They can both be used on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux (and perhaps other platforms), although rubysdl only works on MacOS X if you use a special Ruby interpreter wrapper called "rsdl".
I have not run any serious benchmarks, so I can't provide any definitive data about raw performance. My general impression is that rubysdl might have a slight performance advantage, but they are close enough that performance isn't the main factor when deciding between the two libraries.
Here is how I would summarize the pros and cons of the two libraries:
ruby-sdl-ffi
Easier for users to install the gem. It does not need to be compiled, so users don't need to install a C compiler or toolchain.
Works with MRI (the "usual" Ruby interpreter), JRuby, and probably Rubinius.
No special interpreter is required on MacOS X. However, the MacOS X support may need to be updated to get it working totally right on the latest versions of MacOS X. (Apple keeps changing things.)
Lower-level API, more closely mirrors the C libraries. This may be good or bad depending on your perspective.
Currently has bindings for SDL, SDL_gfx, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, and SDL_ttf libraries. (Compared to rubysdl, it adds SDL_gfx but lacks SGE and SMPEG.) Adding bindings for other libraries is quite easy.
Not actively developed or maintained anymore. I don't have the time or interest anymore, but someone is welcome to take over, and I can provide guidance.
Somewhat experimental, and has some rough edges.
rubysdl
More mature and polished, has withstood the test of time.
Better support for Japanese text input and rendering.
Higher-level, more abstract API.
Binds SDL, SGE, SMPEG, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, and SDL_ttf libraries.
Requires users to have a C compiler to install the gem. This can be quite a headache on Windows and MacOS X.
Requires MacOS X users to run your game using the special "rsdl" Ruby interpreter. Thus, to my knowledge, it will not work with JRuby or Rubinius on MacOS X.
Does not seem to be actively developed or maintained anymore either.
Can the Ruby language be used to create an entire new mobile operating system or desktop operating system i.e. can it be used in system programming?
Well there are a few operating systems out there right now which use higher-level languages than C. Basically the ruby interpreter itself would need to be written in something low-level, and there would need to be some boot-loading code that loaded a fully-functional ruby interpreter into memory as a standalone kernel. Once the ruby interpreter is bootstrapped and running in kernel-mode (or one of the inner rings), there would be nothing stopping you from builing a whole OS on top of it.
Unfortunately, it would likely be very slow. Garbage collection for every OS function would probably be rather noticeable. The ruby interpreter would be responsible for basic things like task scheduling and the network stack, which using a garbage-collecting framework would slow things down considerably. To work around this, odds are good that the "performance critical" pieces would still be written in C.
So yes, technically speaking this is possible. But no one in their right mind would try it (queue crazy person in 3... 2...)
For all practical purposes: No.
While the language itself is not suited for such a task, it is imaginable (in some other universe ;-) that there a Ruby run-time developed with such a goal in mind.
The only "high level" -- yes, the quotes are there for a reason, I don't consider C very "high level" these days -- language I know of designed for Systems Programming is BitC. (Which is quite unlike Ruby.)
Happy coding.
Edit: Here is a list of "Lisp-based OSes". While not Ruby, the dynamically-typed/garbage-collected nature of (many) Lisp implementations makes for a favorable comparison: if those crazy Lispers can do/attempt it, then so can some Ruby fanatic ... or at least they can wish for it ;-) There is even a link to an OCaml OS on the list...
No, not directly
In the same way that Rails is built on top of Ruby, Ruby is built on top of the services that lower layers .. the real OS .. provide.
I suppose one could subset Ruby until it functionally resembled C and then build an OS out of that, but it wouldn't be worth it. Sure, it would have a nice if .. end but C syntax is perfectly usable and we already have C language systems. Also, operating systems don't handle character data very much, so all of the Ruby features to manipulate it wouldn't be as valuable in a kernel.
If we were starting from scratch today we might actually try (as various experimental projects have) to use garbage collected memory allocation in a kernel but we already have OS kernels.
People are making investments at the higher layers rather than redoing work already done. After all, with all the upper level software to run these days, a new kernel would need to present a compatible interface and the question would then be asked "why not just run the nice kernels we already have?".
Now, the application API for a mobile OS could indeed be done for Ruby. So, just as Android apps are written in Java, RubyPhone apps could be written in Ruby. But Ruby might not be the best possible starting point for a rich application platform. Its development so far has been oriented to server-side problems. There exist various graphical interface gems but I don't think they are widely used.
basically yes, but with a big disclamer .. which is basically Chris' answer but a different spin on it. Since for kernel performance it would kinda suck to use ruby, you'd probably want to build around a linux-ish kernel and just not load any of the rest of the operating system. This is basically what Android does: the kernel is a fork from Linux (and is maintained close to linux), the console is a webkit screen, and the interpreter is Java with some Android specific libraries. IE, Android is Java masquerading as an OS, .. you could do about the same thing with Ruby instead of Java and only a smallish hit to performance from java
While building a whole OS from scratch in Ruby seems like
a multi-billion project (think of all the drivers), a
linux kernel module that runs simple ruby scripts does
make sense for me - even it was only for prototyping
new linux drivers.
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I'm trying to find a programming language I feel really comfortable learning and using for desktop/GUI application development. I realize it's unlikely that any language meets ALL of these criteria, but I'd like to find one that meets as many as possible. I've listed the following features ROUGHLY in order from most desirable/important to least.
Ideal Language Features:
Code Style: C/Java-like
GUI Development: Easy, elegant, and platform-Native styling
Community: Widely documented, active development, friendly & helpful, unity of focus
Object-oriented
Garbage Collection, no worrying about pointers, etc
Native compilation, NO 3rd-party runtimes like GTK or .NET
Multi-platform (can be compiled on *nix, Windows, Mac)
Reasonably fast
Mixed typing (soft-typed, OR both soft- and strict-typed -- i.e. Pike)
Background:
Most importantly, I need something that is straight foward and reasonably familiar, and something that isn't going to require a deep understanding of platform-specific APIs. I can't afford to spend a lot of time learning to develop Win32 apps in C++ for example. I've used wxWidgets, and liked the basic usage, but I'm really wanting to use a language with garbage collection, dynamic typing, and so on.
My frustration with Java, C#, and others is the need for a 3rd party runtime. I don't want end users to have to worry about installing and maintaining a separate platform.
Now then. Ideas??
Haha, due to the constraints you imposed you are now left with HTML and javascript. Good luck :)
The answer to your question is simply: None.
You excluded all desirable languages and platforms in your question.
I'd suggest you throw away your aversion against .NET and go with Delphi Prism. It's not C#, it is cross-platform compatible (everything is officially supported on Mono) and you can create applications that bring the runtime with them (Mono as part of your application).
I'd suggest Groovy and Griffon. Groovy is a dynamic language (like Ruby / Python) that runs on the JVM and integrates with millions of Java libraries out there easily. Griffon is a high-productivity RAILS-like framework for developing GUIs. Groovy has been around for 5 years and has a robust community and is supported by SpringSource (now division of VMWare). Griffon is a bit younger, but also has a fairly robust community.
These seem to fit your criteria.
I know I switched from Java to Grails (web framework written in Groovy that's similar to Rails), and haven't looked back.
Have you looked at QT? It's a really great GUI library and there are bindings for just about every language in common usage. There is a ton of documentation and a wide community. You mention that you want to do something in a language with garbage collection and dynamic typing, but rule out Python and Ruby, which are the 2 most popular languages that fit this criteria (also, they both have great QT bindings, I use pyQT4 and it is just awesome). They really aren't that far from what you do in Java/C, you just end up writing a lot less.
Wow you really limit your choices. I'm going to jump on the QT bandwagon and recommend C++.
Most of the objects in QT inherit from another object that sort of does it's own garbage collection.
There is incredible documentation out there for it.
QT is extremely powerful and has most of the elements you would like, and is extensible if you want to modify elements yourself.
If you do a static build for your release build the people you give the application to won't need distribute any other libraries as they will all be built into the .exe file.
The next iteration of Delphi is said to be cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). I think it meets all your requirements except garbage collection.
No language meets all of those restrictions. Technically, it sounds like you're asking for something almost identical to Java but then explicitly disallow Java for unstated reasons. Conceptually, it sounds like you're looking for Python or Ruby but disallow them for using slightly different syntax.
Given the order of priorities, I think the closest you'll find in existing languages might be C with the Boehm GC and GTK+ for the GUI (and GLib for the object system). You do say "No GTK" under "No third-party runtime required", but I'm not sure what "runtime" you refer to here, since IIRC it's just a bunch of C libraries.
Given the specificity of the requirements, I think your best bet is to write your own language. Compilers really aren't that hard to write anymore. There are off-the-shelf tools to help with parsing and code generation and math and text processing and GC and so on. Once you get started you'll probably find people willing to help port it. Many existing cross-platform GUI libraries (like wxWidgets) use C/C++ so if you have a decent FFI you can use that, too. You want "support" and "documented" but if you're the primary author you'll understand it better than anybody. The hardest part about a language is design, and it sounds like you have a picture in your head of exactly what the language should be already.
There are a few if you can accept either WxWindows or GTK or QT as a toolkit.
In the order of my personal preference would be:
Eiffel Studio
D with the D-GTK binding
F#
javascript?
might be not the fastest one and doesn't fully address all your needs, but hey... its everywhere and easy to learn
didn't read after the list, but with prism You can probably achieve most your goals.
or You can try Qt and c++ autopointers
Silverlight could actually give you enough cross-platform availability to use C#/.NET, but I am not sure it fits all your requirements.
Sounds like Action Script 3 will make you happy. But it's more web oriented but you could try to make a projector or an Air application. I think it's a good solution because you can do anything with AS3 (image, video, text, sound video text keyboard and mouse input, pear to pear and 3d since flash 10, ...) and it's cross platform and you can use it on the web or your desktop :)
If you are a pure root coder (using vim and only command line for ex) you can make your whole app without using the flash ide, by just writing your as files and compiling them with mxmlc (that comes with the free flex sdk).
I suggest Python. Although it doesn't fit your first requirement of coding style, but it fits all your other requirements!
GUI Development: Easy, elegant, and platform-Native styling --> Yes
I'd suggest that you try wxPython (wxWidgets for Python). This is so "native" on Python that about 90% of all the wxWidgets code examples on the Internet are for Python! I've personally used TkInter, Gtk and wxPython. All of them are well supported on Python. My personal choice is wx.
Community: Widely documented, active development, friendly & helpful, unity of focus --> YES
Object-oriented --> Yes
Garbage Collection, no worrying about pointers, etc --> Yes
Native compilation, NO 3rd-party runtimes like GTK or .NET --> Yes. - You can eiter:
pack a single dll with your code - or
use py2exe which is able to create a single executable out of your project
Multi-platform (can be compiled on *nix, Windows, Mac) --> Yes.
Reasonably fast --> Yes. Well, it's not the fastest out there, but close enough that some serious projects are done in Python only.
Mixed typing (soft-typed, OR both soft- and strict-typed -- i.e. Pike) --> Yes.
Regarding your first requirement I'd say that you should give Python at least a try. It requires very little effort to get started. There is a 2-hour tutorial which gives you a serious introduction. There's a Basic to Advanced tutorial where I'd almost guarantee that you'll be writing your first application on the second day.
I also feel your pain Brian. Most time when I ask questions about desktop GUIs the only answer I get is: "Make it Web". You really nailed it, since your question is still open inspite some really non-constructive answers...
I've been watching closely JavaFX 2, it solves some of Swing problems and seems very promising. This may be the only thing Oracle did right since getting Java from Sun.
UPDATE:
.NET is finally becoming an open-source, cross-platform solution. .NET Core allows native compilation for multiple devices.
The new .NET experience is exactly what I was looking for when I asked this question several years ago.
Original:
Lots of good suggestions, despite being salted with negativity throughout.
I think I'm going to go with C# and Mono. I like C# well enough syntactically (I've been accused often of being shallow, but the syntax of a language is just as important to me as its features, because I spend a lot of time writing in that particular syntax). Although similar to Java, it has a few unique features that I appreciate, and I think the community seems more open-minded.
My biggest complaint about Java besides performance, frankly, is the community. It seems infected with an excess of arrogance, and it also seems to be very fragmented in terms of support for and development on various overlapping libraries, tools, and so on. The community surrounding Mono seems much more organized.
Actually, so does .NET itself, for that matter. Sun is a big enterprise company that seems every bit as confused about what it IS and what it DOES as Microsoft or IBM, yet they seem to be doing an even worse job of leading and organizing their platform than Microsoft, which is pretty tragic.
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I am wanting to learn mac development with ruby but I'm not sure which one to go at. RubyCocoa has been around longer but I think MacRuby will beat it out in the long run..
Any suggestions??
Go with MacRuby. It's the future :)
It's newer, way faster, and much better integrated. HotCocoa is awesome as well.
MacRuby is a Ruby VM implemented on top of Apple Technologies as opposed to a bridge like RubyCocoa. A Ruby String for example is an NSString by nature, instead of being bridged by the runtime. It's a much cleaner, faster and more solid approach. It's also developed and sponsored by Apple, which means it could become part of OS X at some point.
Also see this post: Why MacRuby Matters
Since Chuck replied to you, things changed quite a lot, MacRuby now uses LLVM, allows for AOT compilation and is quite stable and much faster than it used to be. The ruby side of things still need some work for be 100% compatible but as I'm writing this response, 0.5 is still in beta and you should see ruby libraries being compatible very quickly.
RubyCocoa is more mature and better tested. MacRuby is simpler and better designed overall. MacRuby is also about as stable as a lawn chair sitting on a beachball. Seriously. It's definitely the one you want to use in the long run, but it isn't there yet. They're not so different that you'd have to "learn" one versus the other. They're both just Ruby with access to the Cocoa APIs. It's more about knowing the Cocoa APIs than anything else.
I would recommend learning Cocoa with Objective-C. Once you have a good grasp on the central concepts of the framework (which are all based on Objective-C), then you can use Ruby if you still want to.
Update 2011
The above is no longer true of MacRuby. It's very solid and fast enough to do most kinds of Cocoa applications in pure Ruby. The MacRuby team have also gone out of their way to be compatible with pretty much all of the system frameworks, even the C ones. If you like Ruby and want to do Mac development, it's definitely something to consider. There is no reason to choose RubyCocoa anymore unless you need to support ancient versions of OS X or PowerPC (MacRuby is strictly Intel 10.5+). The remaining caveats:
Having to include MacRuby.framework in your apps puts a high lower boundary on bundle size (a couple dozen MB for "Hello World" IIRC)
Although it's stable in general, it's still very new beta software, so there are a few wrinkles in the less-used corners of the libraries (e.g. Pointers have a few quirks), and some design decisions aren't final (e.g. concurrency support is evolving rapidly)
The documentation is still a work in progress, and lags behind the fast-moving language. A lot of articles you'll find about MacRuby suggest that HotCocoa is the cool, native way to make apps — it is a cool experiment, but it is now abandonware with some critical flaws that make it unsuitable for large-scale application development. The standard Xcode toolchain is the supported way to do MacRuby development.
I also still recommend learning Cocoa with Objective-C, just because that's the framework's native language and thus the path of least resistance.