Opal VS yjit

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.

Ruby 3.2.0 is here and it offers some nice additions to the language. One of the most exciting new things is the addition of a compiler, YJIT. YJIT was created by the folks from Shopify and has been producion tested for a while, so it is safe to use in your environment. Some benchmarks show the difference in speed compared to Ruby without YJIT. I'll put some links if you want to know more: https://speed.yjit.org/ https://www.solnic.dev/p/benchmarking-ruby-32-with-yjit

> I’m curious how the impact affects development, deployment, etc.

YJIT is pretty much transparent in production, if not it's likely a bug.

When we tried MJIT in production to compare it against YJIT, it causes lots of request timeouts on deploy, because the JIT warmup would take 10 to 20 minutes and it's much slower during that phase.

But YJIT warms ups extremely fast and with a much lower overhead, it's seemless on deploy.

The only thing you may need to tweak is `--yjit-exec-mem-size`, it defaults to `--yjit-exec-mem-size=256` (MB) which is not quite enough for larger apps.

As for development, it would work, but with code reloading enabled, you'd likely exhaust the executable memory allocation pretty fast, because for now YJIT doesn't GC generated code [0]. It will come soon, hopefully before the 3.1.0 release, but that's one of the reason why it's not enabled by default.

[0] https://github.com/Shopify/yjit/issues/87

Just want to temper expectations because YJIT is still new. But if you run into crashes or bugs, please open an issue with as much detail as you can: https://github.com/Shopify/yjit

You raised a point that the compiler only does a subset. That's actually what I would expect from a new project. I don't expect a full implementation to start. It takes time for a compiler to be mature enough to be general purpose. Here is another Ruby compiler in its infancy: https://github.com/Shopify/yjit.

We already collaborate extensively with GitHub around Rails and Ruby. Our respective Ruby and Rails infra teams hold regular meetings, and they already contributed substantial patches to YJIT, e.g. https://github.com/Shopify/yjit/pulls/jhawthorn. Also things like https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17763 are a collaboration.

Yes. I put some suggestions here. I realize that not all of them are practical, but refactoring specific hot methods could make a difference.