Opal VS spec

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.

You may define that Ruby is "CRuby" (MRI), the full-fledged implementation of the Ruby programming language specification (https://github.com/ruby/spec/).

Testing: Interestingly, most of the work was figuring out how to test the library reliably. Grizzly-rb is proudly tested against the ruby/spec repository using Mspec and Rubocop. Special thank you to the person recommending Rubocop in a previous post.  The tests cover Enumerable, Array, Enumerator and Enumerator::Lazy classes.

Ruby interpreter is a complex program, so it naturally has bugs, and Ruby interpreter developers are taking various countermeasures against them. For example, we write tests and check them in CI environment (This is the result of daily maintenance of the test environment, such as RubyCI, chkbuild, ruby/spec: The Ruby Spec Suite aka ruby/spec and machines).

I can't find the link to the official announcement, but many years ago they published an official ISO for Ruby, however at the time the ISO was based off of 1.8.7 syntax/semantics. Other than that, you have the RubySpec project which is a series of tests that validate how Ruby should work.

Java could have been a good example, but Sun had a rather strict validation process for calling something Java.

Furthermore, there are big difference in philosophy with C:

1. IB and UB are not considered normal parts of specifications, meaning there's way less opportunity for originality in the interpretation of the specifications

2. there tends to be an ur-implementation, and notable divergences from that tends to be interpreted as either a bug in the other implementation(s) or a lack of specification to be resolved between all implementations

Rust only has UB in unsafe (AFAIK), which greatly limits implementation flexibility in terms of observable behaviour; and the reference implementation would very much be considered the reference implementation, so I expect e.g. rust-gcc will be sticking close to the reference implementation and behavioural divergence will either be fixed to match, or will lead to more precise specification and both implementations converging.

Probably eventually with, if not a Sun-style validation suite, a Ruby-style Spec Suite (https://github.com/ruby/spec).

Ruby: https://github.com/ruby/spec Yes, it is not a word document, but it is a spec nonetheless. It is an authoritative source. TypeScript has nothing like this; no, unit tests aren't the same.

Opal is simply a Ruby to JavaScript compiler. While it may be someday possible to run Rails on it, as you can run Rails on JRuby, the primary focus of this project is to allow you to write frontend code in Ruby and possibly share some code between your frontend and backend. It's possible to compile entire Ruby libraries to JavaScript (with little changes needed due to some caveats). Opal supports a Ruby 3.0 level of features (regardless of your backend Ruby version), often surpassing MRuby in terms of compatibility. It is being actively tested for regressions against Ruby Spec and is self-hosting, ie. can compile itself (see: TryRuby).