Opal VS natalie

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.

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.

Since I tried Sorbet, a Ruby type-checker, the idea of building an ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby is a cool side project that has been in my mind for some time now. To my surprise, during Hacktoberfest, I got to know Natalie, this AOT compiler written in C++ by Tim Morgan.

Unlike other languages, ruby is mainly driven by one application - Rails. As newer web FWs come, it's hard to see Rails keep up. The trends for Rails does not look good for the past 5 years [1]. I am hopeful that natalie [2] will work. If it does, it will remove the biggest downside to ruby.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

[2] https://github.com/natalie-lang/natalie