Opal VS core-js

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.

So ruby has a JS transpiler - opal - https://opalrb.com/

I tried using it a little bit but the reality is if you need JS to make your app more interactable it's really worth it to just learn some JS. As soon as you need something complex the extra layer of abstraction just gets in the way and becomes more of a headache, and if you don't need anything complex then you don't need JS in the first place.

I stumbled upon this thing from years ago. I did some more digging to see what other communities thought about it. Turns out that a lot of people are really against Coraline's side.

This is surprisingly common. The other example off the top of my head, a single maintainer of a very popular project who had to temporarily abandon it due to lack of funds, is Denis Pushkarev (zloirock) and core.js (https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02...).

The majority of OSS projects have most of their contributions by one person (the project leader), and the vast majority of OSS contributors don't do it for their job. It seems nearly every single popular OSS project is like this (one unpaid, maybe sponsored, volunteer doing most of the work); it's not even worth listing projects and names, because you can just pick a couple projects you know and I bet at least one will be an example. Fortunately, most of these people seem to be well-off (probably in part due to the quality of programming jobs), but every once in a while there's someone who's not so fortunate. It should be more common to sponsor maintainers, especially if they are asking for donations provided they can prove that they really need the money (the world we live in, some people who have plenty fake issues to solicit donations, then others who genuinely need and deserve the money are scolded and left unfunded because of them).

Funny you say that, I was just thinking earlier today back to the core-js drama.

In short: the creator of a NPM package that is used by approximately everyone, everywhere, was facing a legal battle. He had been developing this package full time for years and did not have the cash on hand to hire a lawyer. He added a console log that ran on installing his package that said something like "If you're using core-js please consider donating". Queue an absolute shitstorm of people screaming at him in the github issues and him going to prison for around 10 months. Luckily he seems to be back on the grind nowadays, with a decently robust cross-platform slush fund to boot (~200k USD across Pateron, Open Collective, Bitcoin).

It can be a rough world out there for the folks building for the "focus, productivity and anti-distraction" platform.

https://github.com/zloirock/core-js

I think everyone here knows that, at some point, the site would start costing a lot of money and would need to be funded in some way. I would love for the Wikipedia donation model to work for a site like this but everything I find points to that not being the case. Reddit gold not covering server costs and open source devs not tied to a corporation struggling to continue working on their projects being two prime examples. If anyone has anything that can convince me to give it a try, please let me know and I will switch this to a non-profit.

Open source developers are not being paid. They published under licenses that allow zero cost and businesses won't pay.

If you want to write open source code for living, you have to find a business model that works. In this case, it is even under permissive license.

* code freeze - code is under open source license only a certain time after commit/release. Maybe add "support", aka you get security fixes in timely manner.

* open core - put some features behind commericial door.

* go ImageSharp way of split license. That one is fun, because MS deprecated/killed (throws exceptions on attempt to use) official image/font library and that was was intended replacement. Rather blatant offloading of costs.

This has been rehashed several time (core-js recently https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02...).

The gist of it is: Companies are not going to pay if they don't have to. That is the reality and it's not going to change.

This is one of the few examples. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md

Open source: It sounds pretty nice. Open to everyone... But it sucks in general. People really don't care to contribute to open-source. (e.g. here). It is a really good resource for development but for people who don't know anything about development, it is not important. There needs to be some financial income / support for good open-source.

there is https://github.com/zloirock/core-js but is more or less a 1 guy team and he is grossly under paid and well just read this https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md im shocked he still works on it

Choice is good to a point but at some point it becomes crippling. It still haunts me on Rails. Is it yarn, is it brunch, is it npm, is it webpacker, is it esbuild, is it import maps... plus personally the pad-left debacle left a bad taste in my mouth and this little nugget about core-js was heartbreaking. For me it's hard to pick JS for anything other than what I absolutely must.

There's a real story behind that (but the software is core-js, not nginx)

npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: core-js@<3 is no longer maintained and not recommended for usage due to the number of issues. Please, upgrade your dependencies to the actual version of core-js@3. \> [email protected] postinstall /home/daniel/src/test/node_modules/core-js > node -e "try{require('./postinstall')}catch(e){}" Thank you for using core-js ( https://github.com/zloirock/core-js ) for polyfilling JavaScript standard library! The project needs your help! Please consider supporting of core-js on Open Collective or Patreon: > https://opencollective.com/core-js > https://www.patreon.com/zloirock Also, the author of core-js ( https://github.com/zloirock ) is looking for a good job -)