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Rewriting the Ruby parser

railsatscale.com

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Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#71

Post by d3nj4l »

graypegg wrote: post #41
d3nj4l wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been building a webapp with Rails on and off over weekends. Several times over this process, I thought through some of the architectural decisions and naturally realized that the "Rails way" was the best option to pursue. It's not just because I'm using Rails - my most recent webdev experience was with a SPA driven by a Java backend. I'm sure there are tradeoffs involved (what doesn't?) but with every passing da…

I’ve had the exact same experience! I’m getting to use some new JS SSR frameworks at work (Remix) but I keep using rails for my own things. Gets out of my way.

Remix is pretty nice too, and I appreciate it for bringing Rails-style SSR to style in the React world before RSC, but the power of Rails is from having a complete platform to build your apps on. I don't need to string together five different libraries to implement authentication and e-mails, that comes more or less built into Rails.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#72

Post by freedomben »

arp242 wrote: post #18
lagniappe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

Looking for a job right now, not limited to any specific language, and I see Ruby mentioned plenty of times. Based on that, it seems the reports of Ruby's decline are not as bad as sometimes claimed. If you look at PostgreSQL then a lot of dev work comes from EnterpriseDB and a handful of companies too. The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale" (if I'm not mistaken Twitter has dro…

> The thing with Rails is that it doesn't scale terrible well to "Twitter scale"

It's true that Twitter switch to JVM langs, but it's not true that Ruby doesn't scale (or couldn't have to Twitter's level if they'd kept it). Twitter was early days for Ruby and things have improved a lot, but the only scaling challenge with Ruby is the cost of app instances. I use Elixir/Phoenix now and run 1/4 of the app instances I used to and with much less memory required per instance. (in one app it's 1/10 the ruby instances!) It's traditionally opex cost that hurt Ruby scalability, not technical, and very few companies will ever see the level of success where the cost of servers gets prohibitively high (compared to dev dev cost).

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#73

Post by cremno »

e4m2 wrote: post #26

Interestingly, the actual syntax tree and related structures/functions are generated from the config.yml file and the templates inside the bin directory. They are using a custom template language written in Ruby, here's an example of how they do enum stringification: https://github.com/ruby/yarp/blob/main/bin/templates/src/tok... . Obviously this isn't a novel idea, but IMO this kind of design goes a long way to supp…

>> CRuby actually ships with 90 encodings (as of 3.3)

>This is asinine.

Overall there are even more: 103. But then again 1.9.2 only has 85 and 95 overall. Also one of those new 'overall' ones is the EBCDIC code page for US/Canada.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#74

Post by PaulHoule »

It’s little appreciated how much current parser generators are holding the industry back. That is, LISP maintains a lead in metaprogramming because it bypasses Chomskyism alltogether. It really should be a few lines of code to add an “unless(X) {}” statement to “if(!X) ()” to Java, Python, Ruby but the very idea that you could patch an existing grammar with a separate file is like technology that fell off a UFO. Also anything that you generate a parser for should automatically generate an unparser. Sphinx is a fraction of the framework it could be because it can’t process markup and turn it back to Sphinx.

I think a PEG framework with a few features (like an easy way to implement operator precedence just by stating it with either numeric values or X > Y statements) could be revolutionary. Python is almost there but not quite.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#75

Post by cultofmetatron »

lagniappe wrote: post #8
noelwelsh wrote: post #3

It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.

You're going to incur the wrath for saying the silent part, but you're not wrong. People have the same 5 rails example corps every time someone says one of these two things: - without rails nobody would use ruby - without X corp, ruby's dead Fact is, we're seeing less and less usage, and more and more distillation of the current userbase along the golden paths laid out by DHH. Is it wrong for rails and thus ruby adop…

while rails is great, its comparative advantage has wanned a lot over the verses since it first came out. Its biggest competitors were spring and zend framework (also hunchentoot if you're THAT kind of guy). compared to those, ruby was a breath of fresh air.

Nowadays it has to compete with nodejs, phoenix framework, django and laravel. all of which are within 80% of developer productivity while being vastly more performant. I use phoenix framework myself and while I wish there were more packages available, developer productivity is good enough and we can get away with far less machines to do the job.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#76

Post by BowBun »

sergiotapia wrote: post #44
ljm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ‘is Ruby dying?’ is little more than a meme that has stuck around for longer than it deserves. The continuing work on the language and its performance is impressive, but Ruby (and Rails) themselves have the honour of being stable, tried-and-tested solutions for rapid application development. Is it as exciting as the latest and greatest serverless lambda framework in Typescript? Not really. Is it a dependable…

I used to get invites for jobs and see listings for jobs for Ruby and Rails a lot. Now I don't see any at all. There's most definitely a "dead" feeling to the platform. I hardly hear about new projects being started with Rails as well...

As a Rails person, I get a lot of those requests.

It may be that after years of working on other technologies, you just aren't passing the filters anymore. When we were aggressively hiring Rails devs in 2021, we specifically searched for the seasoned Rails devs that could hop in and get going. I've found less appetite outside of the big shops (Shopify/Github/etc) to pick up junior Rails devs which isn't great.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#77

Post by fknorangesite »

1123581321 wrote: post #68
sergiotapia wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to get invites for jobs and see listings for jobs for Ruby and Rails a lot. Now I don't see any at all. There's most definitely a "dead" feeling to the platform. I hardly hear about new projects being started with Rails as well...

It might just be the economy. I was getting about 20 inquiries a week from Rails positions until around December 2022. It's used in many companies, new and legacy.

Yeah same story here. Until about 6-7 months ago I was hearing from recruiters for Rails jobs daily, both old and new projects.

I'd be very surprised if the decrease since then is out of line with the rest of the industry, regardless of tech stack.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#78

Post by ljm »

freedomben wrote: post #66

It's been really great watching Ruby over the last few years. I had the privilege of having dinner with Matz several years ago near the beginning of Ruby 3.0 work. I was giving a talk about Elixir at a Ruby conference, and he was interested in things I (as a self-professed fanboy of both languages) liked better about Elixir than Ruby. We talked for quite some time, and it became very clear to me that he knew that Rub…

Pattern matching alone is a huge feature and an absolute delight to use when the opportunity presents itself.

I’d love to see where Ractor goes but I worry it will remain niche, like with Refinements.

Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser

#80

Post by nusaru »

> This is the final step before merging YARP into CRuby, and we’re very excited to see it come to fruition. This work will be done in the next couple of work days.

It continues to amaze me the pace at which kddnewton and co. are able to work. His tweet[1] from a few months ago is really relevant here. Being full-time employees and not just open-source volunteers makes a huge difference!

[1]: https://twitter.com/kddnewton/status/1639258413120073730

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