ronin VS Nokogiri

Example: https://github.com/ronin-rb/ronin/blob/2.1.0/man/ronin-bitflip.1.md

No, it's just no longer over-hyped. Ruby is settling into being a mature production language, similar to Python, Java, .NET, C++, etc. As you can see from the RedMonk 2023 data Ruby is very much still alive with tons of repositories on GitHub. Besides Shopify, GitHub is another big Ruby/Rails shop. Also, besides Rails, there are other new and upcoming projects like Hanami, DragonRuby, and Ronin.

Not sure why this is posted today, but for the other kind of Ruby 'hacking' there's Ronin[1]

1: https://ronin-rb.dev/

You might also be interested in Ronin.

This is something that kind of annoys me; there's even a /r/rails sub-reddit specifically for Ruby on Rails stuff. Understandably Rails helped put Ruby on the map. Before Rails, Ruby was just another fringe language. Rails became massively popular, helped many startups quickly build their Web 2.0 sites, and become successful companies (ex: GitHub, LinkedIn, AirBnB, etc). Like others have said, "Rails is where the money is at". However, this posses a problem for the Ruby community: whenever Rails becomes less popular, so does Ruby. I wish the Ruby ecosystem wasn't so heavily centralized around Rails, and that we diversified our uses of Ruby a bit. There's of course Sinatra, dry-rb, Hanami, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, and a dozen security tools written in Ruby such as Metasploit, BeFF, Arachni, and Ronin.

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.

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

great for hacking at xml

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.

And even now, pulling in a Java-based HTML5 parser is still probably easier than re-implementing in FFI, which is why I created https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/issues/2227 and would love to have this the conversation there if possible.