MacRuby 0.5 beta 2 is out.

This is great to see. MacRuby is accomplishing important work very quickly.<p>Here are the highlights from the latest Status Report from 0.5, posted by Laurent on Monday at <a href="http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2009-November/003286.html" rel="nofollow">http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2009-Nov...</a><p>----------------------------------------<p>Enjoy! The final 0.5 release is not far at this point :-)<p>Highlights:<p>- rdoc, ri, rack, sinatra are now working.<p>- DTrace probes are available. Same as in MacRuby 0.4.<p>- BigDecimal, OpenSSL and JSON support (experimental).<p>- macrubyc: support for building fat binaries (using the --arch argument).<p>- New tool: macruby_deploy, to help you deploying a MacRuby application, by ahead-of-time compiling its source code and relocating the MacRuby framework inside the application bundle. One-click Xcode targets provided.<p>- Lots of bugs fixed, especially related to compatibility, thread-safeness and memory/resource leaks.

Although I do all of my deployments on Linux, so MacRuby is not so useful to me, I still think that this is an exciting project: LVM compiler technology, potential for good runtime performance compared to other Ruby implementations, and a really nice interface for writing native Mac applications.<p>If I had to write a Mac app, MacRuby and HotCocoa look great.

Feels like I just tried getting beta 1 working yesterday. Oh yeah, that was yesterday. This would be a lot easier to do if LLVM decided to play nice. Update: Just installed,and worked like a charm! Kudos, guys!

How far off is support for native iPhone apps written in Ruby? Is this on the roadmap?