normandy VS Async Ruby

Some years ago I was on a shitty job - not technically, but the company turned out to be inhumane - at a Ruby shop, and on the side I was toying with mini_racer and I just upgraded to some macOS beta where it failed to build. A shitty +1-1 hack† for a compiler flag later and it was back flying.

A month later I received a cold email from a CTO to chat a bit about that PR, turns out they were using mini_racer heavily and forked it for their own purpose, and also created PyMiniRacer for the Python side of things. Next thing I know I got hired. Two years later the company got acquired.

Of course conditionally adding a compiler flag wasn't what got me hired per se, it only got my profile noticed. Probably side projects such as porting go by example to Ruby by implementing a ~1:1 CSP channel API[1], an Electron desktop client for Mattermost basically on a dare[2], ex mode for the Atom editor so that I could have that frackin' `:w`[3], leveraging Blocks to bolt on object-oriented-ness onto C because "closures are a poor man's object"[4], or reverse-engineering the Xbox One USB gamepad and writing a kext to turn it into a HID device on macOS from scratch on a lonely 7+h train ride with passengers judgementally staring at me sideways[4] probably contributed to it a bit.

My takeaway: luck is when preparation meets opportunity; but don't to side projects to get hired, because if you don't get hired then that time is lost. Rather, of all things, scratch your itch, have fun, embrace whatever quirkiness you fancy; no one can take that away from you.

[0]: https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer/commit/2086db1bbf2b5de4...

[1]: https://github.com/lloeki/normandy

[2]: https://github.com/lloeki/matterfront

[3]: https://github.com/lloeki/ex-mode

[4]: https://github.com/lloeki/cblocks-clobj/blob/master/main.c

[5]: https://github.com/lloeki/xbox_one_controller

Do learn Ruby. You seem to answer your own question! You’re curious about it, worst case you’ll have opened your mind to something else which is only a good thing.

But do not be fooled by Rails, Ruby is quite something else, of which Rails is a very small, opinionated part.

Tips: look at MiniTest source code, Sinatra and Rack source code are quite interesting too.

Shameless plug, a couple of idiomatic Ruby repos of mine:

https://github.com/lloeki/normandy

https://github.com/lloeki/rebel

The Async gem is the natural successor, It's actively maintained, and allows you write synchronous code is if it wasn't non-blocking, and most libraries don't need any special support for Async (exceptions are gems with C extensions that do I/O and DB libraries with connection pooling that would otherwise be thread-based).

https://github.com/socketry/async uses coroutines and I think in general it’s been a great model with very few downsides in practice.

There's async I/O. Here's a library that leans on Ruby 3's fiber scheduler.

Hey folks, wanted to show this off and get feedback. Still early/experimental but there are quite a few concepts I'm excited about here. This project came about while writing a program in Go and loving its approach to concurrency. Being a long-time Rubyist I immediately started to think about what similar concepts might look like in Ruby.

I set out with two main design constraints:

1. Lightweight: I didn't want routines to be backed by fibers or threads. Having been involved some in the async project (https://github.com/socketry/async), I had some experience using fibers for concurrency but was curious if they could be avoided.

2. Explicitness: Routine behavior must be written to describe exactly how it is to behave. I always felt like concurrent code was hard to fully understand because of the indirection involved. On the spectrum between tedium and magical I wanted to err more on the side of tedium with Goru.

Goru routines are just blocks that are called once for every tick of the reactor. It is up to the developer to implement behavior in terms of a state machine, where on each tick the routine takes some action and then updates the state of the routine for the next tick. This fulfills both design constraints:

1. Because routines are just blocks, they weigh in at about ~345 bytes of memory overhead.

2. Routine behavior is explicit because it is written as a state machine inside the block.

Couple more features worth noting:

* Goru includes channels for buffered reading/writing (similar to channels in Go).

* Goru ships with primitives for non-blocking IO to easily build things like http servers.

Curious your thoughts!

For those who are interested here is the question.

Welcome! Ruby isn't exactly "dying", but the hype/popularity is definitely fading. This is primarily because Ruby is no longer "new", most of Ruby's popularity came from Rails, and now Rails is no longer the "new hotness". However, Ruby still has lots of awesome features and lots of awesome other libraries and frameworks, such as the new fancy irb gem that uses reline, nokogiri, chunky_png, the async gems, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, Ronin, and the new Hanami web framework.

In Github, there is a Async Gem(https://github.com/socketry/async).