Top 4 Implementations/Compiler Open-Source Projects

MRuby

5 5,236 9.8 C

Lightweight Ruby
Opal

36 4,805 9.1 Ruby

Ruby ♥︎ JavaScript

Project mention: RubyJS-Vite | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-04-15

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

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JRuby

24 3,744 9.9 Ruby

JRuby, an implementation of Ruby on the JVM

Project mention: Shoes makes building little graphical programs for Mac, Windows, Linux simple | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-02-23

As someone who has looked at Shoes several times but never dove in, it's confusing how Shoes 4 has been the "preview version" of Shoes for, like, a decade or more. It made me actively avoid getting invested in Shoes 3 (the release promoted on the linked website) because Shoes 4 requires JRuby and I am happy with CRuby (the Ruby interpreter most people think of when they hear "Ruby").
https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/
http://www.rubydoc.info/github/shoes/shoes4
No disrespect to the developers but to me it feels like taking over a GUI toolkit created "to teach programming to everyone" (to quote the Shoes 4 readme) and making it depend upon a super-complicated enterprise-focused Ruby was sort of Missing The Point™ in a huge way.
Heck I couldn't even switch to JRuby if I wanted to because I <3 Ractors and JRuby still lacks CRuby 3.0 feature parity: https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/7459

Rubinius

0 3,061 3.2 C

The Rubinius Language Platform

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).