Bad news

投稿日: May 14, 2010 4:53:42 AM

Well, I felt CasualConc seems to start crashing often (esp. in Collocation) after updating OS X to 10.6.3. But it looks like it's not just how I felt.

I use RubyCocoa, a bridge between Ruby and Objective-C, on all of my apps. I found out that RubyCocoa has a bug and with the change Apple made to Ruby interpreter on 10.6.3, this bug becomes a problem on RubyCocoa.

My options are rewriting my apps in MacRuby or Objective-C. The former is easier, but in the current status, it doesn't handle texts (and regex) very well. I did a simple test and creating a word list was up to 80 times slower. This means that if it takes a second to create a word list with a current version of CasualConc, it takes 80 seconds to complete the same task with MacRuby. So this is not an option at this moment. The latter option, Objective-C, is also not very promising. Well, Objective-C itself is not a problem. It doesn't have a built-in Regex class, but there are free regex framworks out there. But the problem is I have no knowledge of C++. I only know some basic Objective-C through RubyCocoa. So I have to start everything from scratch.

I hope the developers of RubyCocoa will fix this, but unfortunately, RubyCocoa is in maintenance mode (most of the developers moved to MacRuby development, I read).

In the end, I might have to go with Objective-C. But in that case, the earlier versions will only have very basic functions that CasualConc has now. And it will probably take a long time. Currently, I don't have any time to start new thing and I don't know how much time I will have even after I finish my current project (or dissertation, to be exact).

In the mean time, CasualConc and other apps are still usable (I use CasualConc everyday). But just be careful when you scroll tables, especially in Collocation (because a Collocation table has a lot of columns).

UPDATE: I contacted a maintainer of RubyCocoa. He told me he would work on this issue, so hopefully this will be fixed in the near future.