Rewriting the Ruby parser
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Rewriting the Ruby parser
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Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#2Somewhat fitting
xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/927/
Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#3It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.
Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#4It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.
Github is built with Ruby on Rails and they are heavily investing on it, too. See this recent blog post [1] for more details.
[1] https://github.blog/2023-04-06-building-github-with-ruby-and...
Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#5It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.
Github employees also send a lot of commits to Ruby and Rails. But probably not as many as Shoppify.
There might be one or two additional big companies that are similarly funding employees to contribute to core infrastructure in significant ways.
But not too many more than a handful, I agree. And they are carrying a lot of weight in ruby ecosystem for sure.
I feel like this era of open source in general is one of very shifting patterns of contribution for sustainability. One or a few big companies paying people to keep the thing alive is definitely one that seems to be increasing.
Perhaps since the company(ies) in question didn't originate the product(s) in this case, it doesn't feel like they "own" them exactly (not like "open source" products originated and developed by only one company where the product is their business itself -- not sure which category O'Caml fits in), but the risk in depending on only one or two companies (where the product is _not_ their actual business itself) is that if the company decides it no longer wants to make the investment, it can definitely be disastrous for the product. Shoppify just did a bunch of layoffs -- I don't think they hit the people contributing to ruby too hard, but they easily could have, except perhaps Shopify too realizes that if they stopped keeping Ruby alive it would be disastrous for their own business.
Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#6It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.
Github is doing some as well. Although with resources from Microsoft I do wish they do more.
Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#7I love how pragmatic the approach is here. We still don't have parser generators which generate human understandable/readable recursive descent parser with good error recovery baked in. But i am guessing the ruby syntax is too complicated/irregular anyway.
On a macro side, i am always surprised with the length and effort company will go to keep working with solution design and selected at their young age, and try to scale them well beyond the braking point. And i feel like most of this effort to keep ruby alive could have been used to slowly transition part of the infra to something JVM/.Net/Rust based for much more bang for engineering buck.
Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#8It 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 adoption to slow down? Not at all, people should use what they like, however I think Rails and Ruby are in this negative spiral where:
- rails is mostly needed for prototyping and crud apps
- this work is typically done by juniors
- rails devs are at this point largely seniors, not juniors
- rails devs pay the bills with other tech or by maintaining legacy rails apps.
There are startlingly few deviations from this, and either everyone majors in rails with a minor in javascript and C++ or they just get happy with their current gig and settle. I wish it weren't the case, but Ruby just hasn't done enough to differentiate itself from Rails, and when compared to neo-PHP or JS there's just not a lot of attractive parts of the golden path Rails provides. It's off-tune for this generation of choice and ubiquity.
We don't need that level of scaffolding anymore and in many cases there are other tools that handle that with more versatility.
Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#9As a devoted rubyist, it seems clear to me in retrospect that ruby's "pretty complex to parse is just fine" approach has been a real challenge to the language's success. For reasons related to discussion in OP.
This project could be one approach to ameliorating that challenge, I'm very pleased to see shopify willing to invest in this, and hope it ends up effecting the ecosystem as hoped.
Re: Rewriting the Ruby parser
#10It feels to me like Shopify is single-handedly keeping Ruby alive. A little bit like Jane Street and O'Caml.
This is wholly irrelevant, but I love the spelling of O'Caml like an Irish last name. I'd definitely frequent a pub called O'Caml's.