Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

github.com

11–20 of 110 posts

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#11

I'm sad Ruby has been, or is, left behind by python. There are lots of little reasons but no real big one. I just love ruby. I love little things like 'unless'. I know it's still with us, but still feels a little sad.

Ruby is changing. I doubt it will ever be as big as the Python world, but I can see it coming back into fashion. I’ve been paying attention to the community and it’s still very active.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#12

I'm sad Ruby has been, or is, left behind by python. There are lots of little reasons but no real big one. I just love ruby. I love little things like 'unless'. I know it's still with us, but still feels a little sad.

While I feel sad too, I think the primary reason why it imploded under its own weight was the "magic". I still love Ruby, for all its developer friendliness and the consistency of its idioms. But too much of that sugar leads to bloat, that requires a bunch of hair-pulling for newbies to grok. Now of course, there exist other simpler frameworks (a la sinatra), but when your posterchild is a thing like Rails, you can't…

Ruby is a good little language, I used it quite a bit for time. Rails is a horror that I've run from whenever possible.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#13

I'm sad Ruby has been, or is, left behind by python. There are lots of little reasons but no real big one. I just love ruby. I love little things like 'unless'. I know it's still with us, but still feels a little sad.

Have you looked at Crystal?

https://crystal-lang.org/

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#14

I'm sad Ruby has been, or is, left behind by python. There are lots of little reasons but no real big one. I just love ruby. I love little things like 'unless'. I know it's still with us, but still feels a little sad.

While I feel sad too, I think the primary reason why it imploded under its own weight was the "magic". I still love Ruby, for all its developer friendliness and the consistency of its idioms. But too much of that sugar leads to bloat, that requires a bunch of hair-pulling for newbies to grok. Now of course, there exist other simpler frameworks (a la sinatra), but when your posterchild is a thing like Rails, you can't…

I recently started using Sinatra for side projects and it’s an absolute pleasure. It’s simple and reliable. I think it should get a lot more recognition.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#15

I'm sad Ruby has been, or is, left behind by python. There are lots of little reasons but no real big one. I just love ruby. I love little things like 'unless'. I know it's still with us, but still feels a little sad.

I was intrigued by it for a while. I can remember the jokes from years ago that it should be renamed the Rails programming language. I find it a shame when an otherwise interesting language gets pigeonholed into single framework.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#16

I'm sad Ruby has been, or is, left behind by python. There are lots of little reasons but no real big one. I just love ruby. I love little things like 'unless'. I know it's still with us, but still feels a little sad.

Ruby is changing. I doubt it will ever be as big as the Python world, but I can see it coming back into fashion. I’ve been paying attention to the community and it’s still very active.

I think there's a lot of burnout in the JS ecosystem, and many are looking for the efficiency of Rails. However, I'm not certain if Ruby on its own is gaining more of a foothold. For a few years it looked like you'd seen more Ruby generalists with tools like Chef and Puppet, but I think Docker has taken a lot of wind out of those sails.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#17

I'm sad Ruby has been, or is, left behind by python. There are lots of little reasons but no real big one. I just love ruby. I love little things like 'unless'. I know it's still with us, but still feels a little sad.

I don’t really think it’s so much that Ruby has declined in popularity (although Rails has), but that Python has exploded as it moved from Academia into data science and ML which are really big right now.

Ruby only ever has one big ecosystem (web development), whereas Python has expanded into several.

But Ruby isn’t going anywhere, so no need to be sad. It’s still a joyful scripting language, and its community is alive and well :)

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby is changing. I doubt it will ever be as big as the Python world, but I can see it coming back into fashion. I’ve been paying attention to the community and it’s still very active.

I think there's a lot of burnout in the JS ecosystem, and many are looking for the efficiency of Rails. However, I'm not certain if Ruby on its own is gaining more of a foothold. For a few years it looked like you'd seen more Ruby generalists with tools like Chef and Puppet, but I think Docker has taken a lot of wind out of those sails.

>Chef and Puppet

And Vagrant.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#19
post #4

Looks great - but since you mention you're inspired by Sorbet, why not use their type annotations instead of rolling your own with Rubyspeed::T? (I don't know too much about C, so this might be obvious to some) Otherwise, I'm excited to try this out. I don't really have any performance-sensitive ruby personal projects, but with time and improvements pushing this to a production-ready state this could be a lifesaver i…

I think it's possible, mostly didn't go down that route to keep things as simple as possible at first.

Re: Show HN: Compile Ruby to C

#20
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are probably not for the same use case. Crystal is a whole another language, and you'd have to migrate your whole codebase there. This (in my understanding) is more for compiling certain heavily used functions in your otherwise Ruby codebase to get a quick performance boost.

Doesn't the new ruby JIT already do the same thing?

It's certainly related -- not sure what kinds if specialisation the new ruby JIT does.
Post reply on HN