FreeRIDE 0.8

FreeRIDE is an open source IDE for Ruby, written mostly in Ruby. I've been following its progress for some months now and was pretty excited to see the latest version appear only a month an half after its predecessor. I wish I could report that it's an awesome product, because I want it to succeed, but at this point it still has too many rough edges. If you just want an editor that highlights Ruby's somewhat bizarre syntax it does a great job, but when it comes time to execute or debug code it still has some issues. I found that the running on the Windows platform (XP) was less stable than on Linux but I've found issues with both. I've reported some bugs and the lead developers have been extremely responsive. I don't think the issues are from lack of trying, more perhaps from the lack of a big community behind the product. As much as I love Eclipse I don't think a Ruby plugin for Eclipse is the right IDE solution for Ruby. Much like Smalltalk, Ruby deserves a 'pure' Ruby IDE. I hope FreeRIDE can become that

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