It seems to me that the introduction of Swift has some fantastic potential for Ruby and improving Ruby performance. As a team, we're loving the ability to universally use Ruby at the moment. For example, we have effectively replaced JavaScript with Opal for our Ruby and Rails apps and are using RubyMotion for iOS (and now soon Android) development.
My question: Are there any ways that we can bring Ruby into the status of first class citizen in Xcode so that we'll be able to take advantage of the Xcode 6 Playgrounds, get a ruby repl in Xcode's console, and perhaps take advantage of the other new offerings?
I am HOPING that we are not still screwed a la this old request.
FYI, I have also posed this question to Apple via bugreport.apple.com in hopes to get some additional insight for extending Xcode from the other side of the fence.
I also can't anticipate the internal decisions of Apple BUT there are some facts we can be sure of:
Apple is marketing Swift as THE future way to build iOS apps, there was no mention of adding additional Ruby support (or any other language) for XCode anywhere I've seen in WWDC 2014 announcements or elsewhere in the official Apple release notes, if I'm wrong, please link.
Laurent Sansonetti (as you probably know) was pretty much the MacRuby guy, he was the main developer on the project. Apple wasn't interested in really developing MacRuby further commercially and asked him to work on other Apple projects more (not to speak for him, this may be wrong but he mentioned this at Bubbleconf which I attended in 2012) http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/06/27/laurent-sansonetti-of-rubymotion-fame-to-speak-at-bubbleconf-2012/). He implied this was one of his reasons when he departed from Apple to found his company HipByte.
Apple has made no improvements to MacRuby support or to support Ruby for iOS, or XCode tooling for Ruby since 2012 when Laurent left. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If you're after a REPL or live-coding environment for RubyMotion, RubyMotion has a ticket for it in their bug tracker: http://hipbyte.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RM-74. Please upvote it, even just hot reloading Teacup stylesheets would be a massive time-saver for us too.