Spinel Alternatives

spinel reviews and mentions

• Ruby inventor Matz working on native compiler with AI help
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2026
• Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 May 2026

  I'm recently seeing more and more Ruby projects that are at least vibe-coded, and I'm kind of torn. On the one hand I appreciate that this allows people to create stuff that they maybe wouldn't have the time to do otherwise. On the other, the code itself makes it harder for people to contribute, especially those, like me, who don't use coding agents.

  A random example:

  https://github.com/amatsuda/rubish/blob/master/lib/rubish/pa...

  Where are the interface boundaries? Why are there methods that are 200 lines long? This is not a dis at the author, and it's not really about "code quality" per se, whatever that means. It's just that if someone would like to study the code and be able to improve it or add features, how would one go about it? Does this mean you have to use a coding agent in order to contribute? I felt the same about the recent Ruby compiler from matz [1]. The code looks impenetrable. What does this bode for the future of OSS?

  [1] https://github.com/matz/spinel

• Introducing Rubyduino, a Ruby to Arduino UNO compiler based on Matz's Spinel!
  2 projects | dev.to | 8 May 2026

  Under the hood it uses Spinel, a Matz's Ruby AOT compiler, vendored at a pinned revision.

• This is pretty exciting! https://github.com/matz/spinel
  1 project | dev.to | 24 Apr 2026

  GitHub - matz/spinel · GitHub

• Spinel: Ruby AOT Native Compiler
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Apr 2026

  The original C wasn't that great either. For example emit.c from an earlier commit [1]

  Another pattern that I see in my own Code whenever I ask Claude to write a code generator. It always writes a separate call to the emit/print function for every single line. No conception of taking advantage of the C feature of concatenating adjacent literals (have one literal for every line, let the C compiler concatenate them together into one huge literal). That would leave you with code that is just as readable, but only calls the emit function once, leading to a smaller and faster binary.

  [1] https://github.com/matz/spinel/blob/aba17d8266d72fae3555ec91...

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