starfx VS Async Ruby

Ah! A real criticism of FE development, I agree with your problem statement.

When you jump into the world of single-page applications, things get complex pretty quickly, because the use case for needing an SPA pushes the web app into a full desktop application.

Ultimately, for a highly interactive and dynamic "desktop-class" user experience, there is added complexity. I think that's why so much movement within the FE world has moved away from "SPA for everything" and into these mixed dynamic apps. Islands, React Server Components, NextJS, they all help create a middleground between a document-based website with no dynamic elements with a full blown desktop app experience. They all have real tradeoffs, in particular adding an entirely new backend service to serve the front end.

For many projects, react + react-query is probably enough.

Having said that, my argument from https://bower.sh/dogma-of-restful-api still stands: when you build an API that is RESTful (1:1 mapping between endpoint and entity) you are unknowingly pushing the complexity of data synchronization to the FE, which requires a well thought out ETL pipeline.

This probably doesn't help my case but I've been building a simplified middle-layer for react to bridge the gap between react-query and full blown SPA: https://starfx.bower.sh

`redux-saga` maintainer here.

I've been using `effection` to build a replacement for `redux-saga` over at https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

Effection has demonstrated to me how truly powerful delimited continuations are and why structured concurrency is an incredible asset for anything that requires async flow control -- basically everything in TS/JS.

I know sometimes it's hard to imagine why someone would need structured concurrency or care about delimited continuations for a front-end application, but this is a game changer in terms of expressing async flow control.

Some things to note about Effection:

- API surface area is small https://github.com/thefrontside/effection/issues/851

- It tries to stay as close to JS constructs as possible so it will feel very familiar

- Resource cleanup is automatic (when a function passes out of scope all descendent tasks are shut down automatically)

- End-user doesn't need to think about delimited continuations

The only leap users need to "deal with" coming from async/await is the syntax.

    import { main, call } from "effection";

- https://github.com/thefrontside/continuation

- https://github.com/thefrontside/effection/tree/v3

- https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

The last one intends to replace redux-saga using DCs.

Here’s a presentation I gave recently talking about DCs in typescript: https://youtu.be/uRbqLGj_6mI?si=XI0JNMKMoO2VHMvM

A couple of us have been experimenting with deliminited continuations and I think it’s gonna take off soon:

https://youtu.be/uRbqLGj_6mI?si=kgKKjpCnehJ9bpIG

https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

I feel the same way which is why I decided to help maintain the project. Async flow control is very tricky even in js–land. Having watchers live inside of a while-loop is a powerful construct that lends itself to interest flow control patterns.

I'm also in the process of rebuilding redux-saga but without the redux part: https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

It's still in alpha stage, but it is very reminiscent of redux-saga.

The Async gem is the natural successor, It's actively maintained, and allows you write synchronous code is if it wasn't non-blocking, and most libraries don't need any special support for Async (exceptions are gems with C extensions that do I/O and DB libraries with connection pooling that would otherwise be thread-based).

https://github.com/socketry/async uses coroutines and I think in general it’s been a great model with very few downsides in practice.

There's async I/O. Here's a library that leans on Ruby 3's fiber scheduler.

Hey folks, wanted to show this off and get feedback. Still early/experimental but there are quite a few concepts I'm excited about here. This project came about while writing a program in Go and loving its approach to concurrency. Being a long-time Rubyist I immediately started to think about what similar concepts might look like in Ruby.

I set out with two main design constraints:

1. Lightweight: I didn't want routines to be backed by fibers or threads. Having been involved some in the async project (https://github.com/socketry/async), I had some experience using fibers for concurrency but was curious if they could be avoided.

2. Explicitness: Routine behavior must be written to describe exactly how it is to behave. I always felt like concurrent code was hard to fully understand because of the indirection involved. On the spectrum between tedium and magical I wanted to err more on the side of tedium with Goru.

Goru routines are just blocks that are called once for every tick of the reactor. It is up to the developer to implement behavior in terms of a state machine, where on each tick the routine takes some action and then updates the state of the routine for the next tick. This fulfills both design constraints:

1. Because routines are just blocks, they weigh in at about ~345 bytes of memory overhead.

2. Routine behavior is explicit because it is written as a state machine inside the block.

Couple more features worth noting:

* Goru includes channels for buffered reading/writing (similar to channels in Go).

* Goru ships with primitives for non-blocking IO to easily build things like http servers.

Curious your thoughts!

For those who are interested here is the question.

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.

In Github, there is a Async Gem(https://github.com/socketry/async).