I'm happy that the RubyMotion guys can charge money for what they're doing.
But if you're going to stay closed source, you're asking me to just trust you that important (to me) bugs are going to get fixed fast enough. That is very hard to do.
That is the real value of open source. It's not about the money -- an extra $200 is nothing in a development budget. It's about being able to fix the bugs myself when they matter enough.
... or at least hire someone to fix the bugs for you.
I wonder if there are any closed-source software shops that have a "pays us a premium to fix bug X first" option. Doesn't seem like it would work too well.
I worked for one and it works very well. They build one of the most common electronic medical record systems plus a bunch of associated software. Any large client, in this case a hospital, hospital chain, or large ambulatory clinic, pays a $mm annual fee for the right to call and notify of a breaking bug and get engineers to issue a fix asap.
By that I mean, clients with budgets will opt for enterprise services. That's not necessarily fair, but humans like expensive stuff, especially when it's not their money.
The thing is, engineers who move into SaaS and try to tackle that middle ground tend to be shafted. This is why people like 'patio11 so often recommend aiming for the enterprisey folks - that's where you make a living.
Well, I believe two ways. First, I'm sure the contracts have penalties, plus hospitals have lawyers. Second, when companies spend tens of millions of dollars per year or more, they certainly talk to a bunch of current clients. If word gets around that your company screws customers it will throw a wrench in sales. There aren't that many hospitals, particularly if you view chains like kaiser as a single customer, in the US.
I'm at least annoyed that an LLVM static compiler was hyped up for MacRuby (some code was even available) less than 6 months before RubyMotion became a thing. Always felt fishy to me.
That is $200, then after a year you will have to pay $100 to get updates. That was not cheap, I was hoping that I can continue recieving updates for my initial purchase, since many apps which is payed only once does that.
I've been using Ruby for some years now, and let me tell you something: just learn Obj-C. It's not hard to learn, is actually a pleasure to write, and will surprise you with it's elegance sometimes, e.g. KVC collection operators (http://nshipster.com/kvc-collection-operators/).
RubyMotion would have been awesome a few years ago, but now that Obj-C has ARC, literals for dictionaries and arrays, and blocks (yes!), I can't help but think that RubyMotion has missed the boat. Learn Obj-C. Go to iTunes U, get Stanford CS193P, and have a bunch of fun.
This. After the addition of blocks, Grand Central Dispatch, and the booting of garbage collection in favour of ARC, ObjC is a pleasure to code in and to see it perform. As mentioned, KVC/KVO have made the UI code for my app much simpler than without them.
I'd add that one not be fooled by the apparent verbosity of the "selectors", which is the ObjC equivalent of lisp parens that hits folks new to the language. Their cognitive overhead (for me) is rather low, and they make the code readable without profuse commenting. XCode has been a pleasure as well (despite the occasional crashes), due to the live code correctness feedback (thanks to llvm/clang), auto-complete and auto-correct.
Overall, practically everything's been improving in iOS land as far as I can tell.
Using Xcode is a shit experience, it crashes numerous times each day, creates zombie processes when testing in the simulator, and has something like 1000 tiny problems that are irritating. LLDB is powerful, but not a proper REPL.
> using Xcode is a far superior experience to RubyMotion and any editor
Yesterday I had to convert a list of constants into mathematical operations. Took ten seconds to make the macro in vim, and then I ran it twenty times in a second. Compare with the five to ten minutes it would have taken doing option+arrow around the numbers to add characters before and after.
I've turned off all of Xcode's text editing functionality (except for esc to code complete) because it was interfering with typing instead of helping. I've tried to turn off all the "jump to error" stuff in the settings, but it still insists on jumping to the disassembly for main() when it hits an error.
> using Xcode is a far superior experience to RubyMotion and any editor.
XCode is not ideal for people accustomed to, say, vim. I love the static code analysis and the autocomplete and storyboards are pretty cool too. But having to edit text like a normal human instead of using vim sucks and the split pane handling is garbage. I would rather do all my dev in vim.
Xcode has command line tools. You don't have to use the GUI exclusively. Also I know at least one developer that uses vim for editing but uses Xcode for building. It's probably in your best interest to use some combination (e.g. Xcode for configuring your build settings)
As it happens, ViEmu has just launched their product on XCode as well. From the couple of days in use, I'm quite pleased with it in comparison with Vicious that I used before that.
xvim is super alpha... the visual studio guys just released a vim plugin for xcode too... I haven't used the xcode one yet but if it's as good as the visual studio one it should be very good. (I have contributed to xvim and I have purchased the visual studio plugin)
Having parts of a string perform operations on a container is not elegant, it's a crutch for the lack of availability of generic operations or something like LINQ. Many of Objective-C's interesting features have this problem that either they're too magical, have an odd syntax or are leaky abstractions due to the limitations of backward compatibility.
I have been waiting for a post like this for a long time. There seems to be a distinct lack of "I use rubymotion and here are my thoughts" type posts that provide concrete details.
Really appreciate the article and I am interested to see where this leads for RubyMotion.
If you're curious to hear more perspectives on using RubyMotion in production, you might check out Clay Allsopp's blog posts (e.g. http://clayallsopp.com/posts/rubymotion-year-one/). His startup has been using RubyMotion for a while and he's written tutorial and a book for it as well.
Laurent himself replied to that blog post saying the bug was resolved in RM v1.20. What's the difference between RM-3 and what that post describes? They read very similar to me.
I just bought a RubyMotion license and I really enjoyed creating my first iPhone App but I don't think I would have started if I knew about this issue.
I really hope that they get around to fixing this problem, it does make me a bit concerned that they are pushing big new features while such a serious issue seems to exists.
This is exactly how I'm feeling now. I've been prototyping and loving it, but I almost don't even want to try releasing an application if the support burden is going to be that high...
Now it's like, well, why not just use Objective-C? I sort of just wish I had my $200 back.
Think of the bright side - becoming aware of the perils of third-party platform toolchain you are likely saving a huge number of hours and frustration for yourself in the future. For example, I still regret using Google Web Toolkit, and for a few years now, but I'm sort of stuck with it.
This article is quite the breath of fresh air where constant, pointless battles over languages are concerned.
Not only does the author have the courage to admit there are problems with RubyMotion that make it unfit for production use--and seriously, noticeable unexpected and difficult-to-reproduce-and-fix memory errors make any language unfit for production--but he also offers a dispassionate and technical explanation.
I love Obj-C and have eyed RubyMotion and other Ruby-related projects like it (MacRuby, etc.), and it is nice to hear from an unapologetic supporter of a project that it is not production ready, despite the hype and fanfare.
tl;dr: They had a well-known workaround for the known bug involving block variables [apparently not well-enough], so they were focusing on other things. As of right now, they're going drop everything and fix it in RM 2.4.
Apologies for the basic question, but why would this 'analog' (is that another system? An abstraction?) have this issue if it is using ARC? Isn't ARC just a flag in XCode's compiler? If RubyMotion turns it on, wouldn't XCode make all the necessary arrangements? Again, I simply want to understand; I'm not trying to make a point.
It's NOT using ARC. It's using an "analog" (in the original post's words).
With which he means "a substitute", "a similar tech", "their own implementation of the same concept", "something analogous to ARC" (hence the "analog").
(Most people know "analog" only as in "analog vs digital", but it was immediately obvious to me, because I know the etymology of the word from the original language it was adopted from.
Btw, the english dictionary definition that's closer for such a use of the word is:
1. An organ or structure that is similar in function to one in another kind of organism but is of dissimilar evolutionary origin. The wings of birds and the wings of insects are analogs.).
Personally, I use "analog" to mean "not digital" and "analogue" to mean "something similar to". I think that's a little clearer, at least to some US readers.
RubyMotion doesn't use ARC (or Xcode) at all -- it doesn't produce Objective-C code as its output, but executable bytecode intended to be run on the target. The output of Objective-C and RubyMotion, that is, is the same. So you need an equivalent implementation of ARC in RubyMotion to deal with memory management, unless you want to do it manually, which wouldn't make RubyMotion very Ruby-like at all.
This puts in question Ruby Motion's entire premise for existence.
Ruby Motion is supposed to make iOS and Mac OS X app development simpler than Objective C. If there are lots of complex rules and corner cases to learn about and work around, it becomes easier to just write Objective C, where at least the rules about memory are well understood by the community.
Will be interesting to see how HipByte addresses this. They at least need to get in front of the issue with a blog entry or article about how they plan to address it.
Am I the only one who thinks that ARC in a language like Ruby is probably impossible? Even with Objective C they had to add 4 new variable qualifiers, and put that burden on the programmer to use them properly.
That's a good question. I'm not really sure, but I'm almost positive it's related to Ruby or RubyMotion internals, not ARC in general.
As best I can tell from the article and the filed bug, it comes down to not retaining captured variables in blocks. In Objective-C, there's some automatic memory management that happens for you when you capture a variable in a block:
id x = ...;
^{ NSLog(@"%@", x); };
Because the block depends on x, the lifetime of that object needs to be tied to the lifetime of the block. As such, the compiler emits code so that if and when you copy the block onto the heap, it automatically retains x. When the block object is destroyed, it automatically releases x.
Note that, while definitely "automatic reference counting", this isn't, strictly speaking, ARC. Because this is so critical to being able to use blocks without going completely insane, this bit of cleverness was introduced with blocks on 10.6, even though ARC didn't exist yet.
The note in the bug says that it's complicated because they don't want to introduce a performance regression. This suggests that they're not having trouble with retaining objects referenced by the block per se, but rather with being smart about it, so that it's only retained when necessary. The Objective-C compiler does this by constructing blocks on the stack, and requiring an explicit copy to move them to the heap. Only when explicitly copied do they retain the variables they capture, so simple inline cases remain fast. Perhaps Ruby or RubyMotion have something that makes this harder to do.
If that's correct, then I can't say I find the excuse a very good one. Performance regressions are bad, but generating incorrect code is much worse. They need to fix it immediately, take the speed hit, then see about ways to improve performance while maintaining correctness. However, I certainly could be wrong.
I just want to add that RubyMotion is also not correctly capturing the "value" of the variable in a block. i.e. even if you manually retain a local variable's object and don't release it, it wouldn't work correctly if the block runs after the local variable goes out of scope. IMO, this makes it much harder to workaround this retain bug.
The workaround now is just to create a class around each block operation. I've been thinking about this issue quite a bit (I intrigued many developers using RM are actually not observing this issue sooner) and this workaround seems to be the only way to use APIs like #beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler: and #endBackgroundTask: which has no non-block based alternatives and is always called asynchronously.
That's quite weird. I can only assume that normal Ruby has no problem with this. Wonder what changed in RubyMotion to break it. Certainly would need to be fixed before I'd call RM anything other than a toy or experiment.
The fact that there is a workaround is irrelevant for two reasons.
First, said workaround would completely change the entire structure of your ruby code. Basically, kill blocks. This is inferior to Objective-C itself structure-wise.
Second, and most importantly, this bug is not something that jumps out at you. It only causes crashes in some small % of runs. So, the result is your apps look fine, you are writing idiomatic ruby, but once you release to production, you start getting crash reports because you closed over a local variable that ends up being released. This is the kiss of death for production apps: un-reproducible bugs due to magic in the compiler not working as expected.
In other words, even if you know about the bug, and even if you understand the workaround, if you write code naturally, you are going to introduce crashing bugs that are not reproducible that affect some small but measurable percentage of your users. A true nightmare.
I think "irrelevant" is a poor choice of words here.
It is VERY relevant that there is a workaround. Additionally, it's kind of unfair to point at 1 bug (that has a workaround) and judge an entire system on it.
You basically just said "No, you" and then posted some links to logical fallacies. Care to address my argument more directly? The key problem here is that while this bug that may have a workaround (and that workaround is questionable to even work in all cases), it's that the bug does not manifest itself in a development environment, and occurs when you write code naturally. So, you are likely to introduce the bug, but you don't get to know you have crash issues all over your app until you ship it to a lot of users. This, combined with the App Store review delay process, results in a situation where this platform is not tenable for professional software developers to use.
edit: Laurent (RubyMotion lead) has chimed in and raised the priority of this issue, this is great news
you mean the paragraph that includes "...will correct the crashing error – sometimes. I’ve used instance variables and have still experienced crashes in blocks" ? That one? Or was there a paragraph I missed that included a workaround that actually solved the problem rather than minimizing it?
But if you're going to stay closed source, you're asking me to just trust you that important (to me) bugs are going to get fixed fast enough. That is very hard to do.
That is the real value of open source. It's not about the money -- an extra $200 is nothing in a development budget. It's about being able to fix the bugs myself when they matter enough.