Cocoa bridge for Ruby?

I have a handful of useful little programs I've written over the years that I'd really like to keep using, but almost every single one of them has broken with the last few OS upgrades. Well, one of them broke with 10.11, and the last one failed under 10.14. Most of them are written in Ruby, and the biggest problem (although not the only one) has to do with no longer having access to Cocoa. I can't compile RubyCocoa, and I can't even access my old .nib files under XCode any more, as far as I can tell.


Does anybody have any advice on what to do about all this code I'd like to keep using? The only path forward I have so far is "give up and start all over by learning Swift. And the new XCode." Which more or less is the same as "give up, quit programming, go be a user, we don't want you fooling around with code any more."


Is there a way to compile RubyCocoa under 10.14, 10.16, or 10.17? Is there some other way to make Cocoa calls from Ruby? Well, some way other than my current work-around, which is to make kernel calls (e.g. "system()" or backticks) to invoke osascript and feed an AppleScript to it that uses the Foundation framework to make the Cocoa calls. Yeah, it's completely ridiculous.

Replies

Hello snarke. I'm in the same boat as you, with an app developed in MacRuby (an outgrowth of RubyCocoa) years ago. Have you discovered any answers to your question about programming OSX apps in Ruby? There is of course RubyMotion, but that is a 3rd party implementation of Ruby and appears to be currently stuck at Ruby 1.9 compatibility, which is way out of date.
Nope; I have nothing new to report. Just FYI, I'd started moving code from RubyCocoa to MacRuby, but then Apple dropped support for MacRuby, so I had to migrate some apps *back* to RubyCocoa, because it was newer and had kept up. But now RubyCocoa's been abandoned as well. Most of my Macs are now frozen at 10.11 because I've already had so many apps and code fail with Apple's upgrades that I can't trust them any more.

I admit, the total lack of response here is also quite discouraging.