does rubymotion offer better performance and garbage collection than monotouch?

Question

does rubymotion offer better performance and garbage collection than monotouch?

I am interested in both, and aside from the large price difference, IDE and debugger, can I expect better memory management and speed from Rubymotion?

Answer 1

I think you should just use what is best for you.

If you know Ruby: use RubyMotion, Objective-C: use XCode, C#: use MonoTouch.

I don't think it is worth it to measure the merits of one against another. I'm a C# Windows Dev, I use MonoTouch. I enjoy parsing XML in one line of code, using Linq, Lambda expressions, etc. so I am definitely going to want to use C#.

If you are used to Ruby for programming other projects, use RubyMotion. Although, RubyMotion is fairly new, so it might be less mature than using MonoTouch or plain XCode.

In my opinion, any performance hit incurred by using Ruby or C# over Obj-C is going to be negligible compared to the gains in productivity and ease of maintenance (or a lesser learning curve if you don't know Objective-C).

Answer 2

Both should have similar performance levels although if something needs to finely optimized you are better off jumping to C or C++ in those cases. RubyMotion uses automatic reference counting instead of garbage collection. Runtime integration is similar, but different between the two. MonoTouch uses wrappers that convert the calling convention to integrate with the Obj-C runtime. RubyMotion can call Obj-C directly. Although technically RubyMotion has its own runtime based loosely on MRI Ruby, it integrates with the Obj-C runtime without overhead and appears seamless. It is similar to how Apple's toll-free bridging works. RubyMotion may be better if you don't like writing wrappers or want to use metaprogramming. RubyMotion does not have an interpreter outside of the simulator. MonoTouch may be more ideal if you are solving a problem better suited to generics or a static type system. RubyMotion has the RubyMine IDE and MonoTouch has an IDE included. Both support debugging. Price is about the same if you count the price of RubyMine.