Getting Started with MacRuby

By joel at Tue, Sep 8 2009 10:51am |

The crew over at Red Artisan has posted a nice introduction to MacRuby on their site. Some of you may know that MacRuby is a version of Ruby scripting language interpreter, ported to run directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies. MacRuby allows one to access much of the functionality in Core OS X frameworks from Ruby, and even the ability to write native Cocoa UI application using the Ruby scripting language. MacRuby could play an important role in science by opening the world of Cocoa-based application development to those who are more comfortable working in a high-level scripting language — which includes many scientist-programmers.

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Wed, 2009-09-09 19:24 — R. B. Love

MacRuby for Scientists

As much as I like Ruby, it has nowhere near the numerical code base that Python has. For number crunching, managing data and displaying results on spectacular graphs Python has a commanding lead. As far as I know, Ruby has nothing to compare to Numpy. I wish it did.

Does anyone here use Ruby for any scientific work? I would love to hear about examples.

Wed, 2009-09-09 22:19 — joel

Ruby for Science

There are lots of people who use Ruby for science. I use it for terabyte-scale medical genomics daily. Collaborative Drug Discovery's platform is written in Ruby (http://www.collaborativedrug.com/). Sanger wrote their near-Petabyte high-throughput genomic sequencing pipeline in Ruby.

I agree with your assessment about libraries, but I guess I take the approach of identifying the need and trying to help with addressing it. It will be a matter of time before it catches up. For most number crunching and plotting I use the RSRuby interface to R, which opens up the whole world of R in native Ruby code.

You can also use NArray (http://narray.rubyforge.org/) and Ruby GSL for numerical computations.

Thu, 2009-09-10 20:34 — R. B. Love

Ruby For Science Examples

Thanks for the two projects you mentioned. I was unaware of them. I will look at NArray.

--Bob

Mon, 2009-09-14 18:20 — R. B. Love

Mac Ruby

OK, I've played with MacRuby a little. I think for simple apps it's very good, make that preferred to Obj-C. I hope to learn more. The best tutorial I found is a free video on Programmatic Programmers site.

Sun, 2009-10-11 14:40 — kwicher

Every day scripting

Hi,

I am using Ruby for analysis of high throughput sequencing data of small RNAs.

It is fun.

I am also learning RSRuby.

Cheers
Krzys

Mon, 2009-10-12 01:23 — nobuyuki nakae

there are useful sites about

there are useful sites about numerical application library in Ruby though they are written in Japanese..

http://jp.rubyist.net/magazine/?0006-RLR
http://pub.cozmixng.org/~the-rwiki/rw-cgi.rb?cmd=view;name=Ruby+for+Science

Mon, 2009-10-12 01:32 — nobuyuki nakae

numerical application library with openCL?

I wonder if there is a project to port some of these numerical application using openCL, GCD on Snow Leopard in MacRuby. Since MacRuby is not yet supporting openCL access(but Ruby can), but MacRuby supports GCD access now. So this will happen only after MacRuby support openCL access.
Then MacOSX(MacRuby) will be very powerful platform for this type of application.

Tue, 2010-10-12 18:24 — djs

Has anyone been able to get

Has anyone been able to get narray or gsl working under snow leopard?