JRuby VS Opal

Charles Nutter had me help him with his JRuby workshop afterwards by showcasing my other Glimmer project, Glimmer DSL for SWT, which runs on JRuby. In about 1 minute, I scaffolded a Hello World desktop app from scratch and then packaged it as a native executable on the Mac. Attendees were impressed. So, I’ve participated in presenting 2 events at this conference.

Are you aware of jruby?

https://www.jruby.org/

It is ruby running on a Java Virtual Machine. Imposes all downsides of the JVM (try to allocate more that 4GByte per object!) and provides JVMs concurrency model. Currently supports Ruby 3.1 (it claims to support 3.4, read the fine print if your specific feature is supported!)

Another way to look at it based on coming across it in enterprise:

How did he build something adopted by so many enterprises?

It does some things at scale very well and has been afforded the performance improvements of very smart people for 30y.

It’s not to say the language isn’t verbose, one of my favourite features was the ability to write code in other languages right inside the a Java app pretty well in-line by using the JVM, thanks to JSR-223.

It was possible to write Ruby or Python code via Jruby or Jython and run it in the JVM.

https://www.jython.org/

https://www.jruby.org/

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/scrip...

As someone who has looked at Shoes several times but never dove in, it's confusing how Shoes 4 has been the "preview version" of Shoes for, like, a decade or more. It made me actively avoid getting invested in Shoes 3 (the release promoted on the linked website) because Shoes 4 requires JRuby and I am happy with CRuby (the Ruby interpreter most people think of when they hear "Ruby").

https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/

http://www.rubydoc.info/github/shoes/shoes4

No disrespect to the developers but to me it feels like taking over a GUI toolkit created "to teach programming to everyone" (to quote the Shoes 4 readme) and making it depend upon a super-complicated enterprise-focused Ruby was sort of Missing The Point™ in a huge way.

Heck I couldn't even switch to JRuby if I wanted to because I <3 Ractors and JRuby still lacks CRuby 3.0 feature parity: https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/7459

__callee__ now properly returns the name under which a method was called, which will be the new name in the case of aliased methods. #2305, #7702

Issue tracker: https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues

rdoc has been updated to 6.3.3 to fix all known CVEs. (#7396, #7404)

Altering the visibility of an included module method no longer changes what super method gets called. (#7240, #7343, #7344, #7356)

It looks like the readme is copy pasta from jruby: https://github.com/jruby/jruby

https://github.com/opal/opal?tab=readme-ov-file#compiling-ru...

:)

It's been a long time dream for me since about 2013 when I started getting deep into Ruby and Rails, to be able to write Ruby code for the frontend instead of JavaScript. I was a lover and adopter of CoffeeScript (which had it's flaws and imperfections), but that mostly got killed by ES6. I wrote some PoCs with Opal[1] that felt pretty good to write, but the overhead was rough (this was many years ago so things might be different now) and I never really felt like I didn't have to know about or care about the underlying javascript. I tend to discard leaky abstractions as I feel they often add more complexity than they were meant to cover in the first place.

Has anybody used this or Opal or anything else? What is the state of "write your frontend in Ruby" nowadays?

[1]: https://github.com/opal/opal

Every time I see a respectable project use a Code of Conduct I remind myself that, unfortunately, Caroline Ada won[1]

[1] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

But we shouldn't overstate the difference: the JS and Ruby object models are actually similar in how dynamic both of them are. This makes Ruby-to-JS compilers like Opal easier to implement, according to an Opal maintainer.

This is an interview with the author of Opal, here's the project:

https://github.com/opal/opal

Not the OP, but from what I remember they would seek out every possible opportunity in every single possible open source community they could find and propose the CoC that they wrote. 0 contributions to the projects, with the exception of demanding that people implement incredibly verbose CoC's in their projects under the guise of "protecting the minorities contributing to the projects".

Most infamous instance is probably this one, in the Opal repo: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

As well as this thread in the Ruby issue tracker that devolves into pure chaos with Ada refusing to actually participate in any of the valid points others bring up: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004

And I'm sure there's many other instances if you look around a bit.

My experience with ruby for front end web dev is via https://opalrb.com/

Here's an example of the creator of the most adopted CoC (the Contributor Covenant) trying to get an open source contributor removed from a project due to his political opinions expressed on Twitter which she didn't like and found offensive.