Ruby + ObjC = MacRuby

Laurent Sansonetti, Apple's Ruby wizard, has released MacRuby, an Apple open source project which unifies Ruby and Cocoa (instead of just bridging them like RubyCocoa does).

MacRuby is a version of Ruby that runs on top of Objective-C. More precisely, MacRuby is currently a port of the Ruby 1.9 implementation for the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector.

Laurent talks about the innards of MacRuby in this interview at InfoQ:

The Ruby object data structure had to be modified to conform to the Objective-C object data structure, so that a Ruby object can be casted at the C level as an Objective-C object. Then, the object allocator was modified to use the Objective-C one instead, which means that all objects (Ruby and Objective-C) are allocated from the same memory pool.

Finally, the traditional Ruby garbage collector was removed and instead we use the Objective-C garbage collector. This change wasn't very easy because the collector runs by default in generational mode, and expects you to appropriately set “write-barriers” every time you register an object in the object store, because it collects young generation of objects based on this information. [Read more here]