Oj VS Nokogiri

Install OJ if you render out JSON a lot

I knew that our app was using Oj for JSON serialisation. But I didn't initially notice anything spooky about pretty_generate. A colleague of mine (shoutout Iain) had keener eyes and pulled up the C file that dealt with something spooky sounding in mimic_json.c.

Hello there, I am using Rails 6.1, I am accustomed to JBuilder, but in an attempt to increase the performance, I decided to use [jb](https://github.com/amatsuda/jb). How can I use [oj](https://github.com/ohler55/oj/) with jb?

I hadn't noticed that Nokogiri added opt-in HTML5 parsing recently. Looks like... based on CHANGELOG it looks like maybe pretty recently indeed, 1.15.0 @ 2023-05-15 ?

release planning: v1.16.0 · Issue #2897 · sparklemotion/nokogiri

RFC: Explore alternatives to libxml2 for HTML parsing · Issue #2064 · sparklemotion/nokogiri, the original discussion that ended with the decision to merge Nokogumbo into Nokogiri

What's holding me back from going all in with Crystal is I have a lot of pre-existing Ruby code, and porting Ruby code to Crystal can be tricky. For example, Crystal lacks an Enumerator class (aka generators) due to captured block semantics. I also wish the shards ecosystem was a little more mature; for example there's multiple HTML parsing libraries, but none have all of the features that Ruby's Nokogiri has. For new greenfield backend projects, I would totally use Crystal.

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.

Mike has worked hard over the years to have Nokogiri come with its dependencies. It does come with libxml and all that is required.

From https://nokogiri.org

> These dependencies are met by default by Nokogiri's packaged versions of the libxml2 and libxslt source code, but a configuration option --use-system-libraries is provided to allow specification of alternative library locations.

Some authors work hard to have their tools do the right thing and consistently.

If the page is rendered as html you can use Nokogiri. It has great support and is pretty easy to get started with too.

About the C-extensions, I'd be curious on what it takes to build extensions using C, and a study around how nokogiri solved the yearlong issue of install-then-compile by shipping arch-based precompiled binaries, and how this should become more of a standard in the ruby community for gems requiring extensions.