Porting Ruby to Crystal

http://squarism.com/2017/02/25/porting-ruby-to-crystal/

108 34 9 years ago

kkirsche• 9 years ago

Thanks! I'm so excited for Crystal to hit 1.0 and be production ready. May need to try it out now though. Thanks again

pkd• 9 years ago

I agree that compile to binary languages are better for distribution, and has always been a pain point with interpreted languages like Ruby. Ruby actually does this better with its ecosystem (RubyGems, Bundler) than a lot of other mainstream languages.

Just to nitpick, capturing STDOUT is not that hard in Ruby at all. Definitely not as easy as Stdio.capture, but Ruby gives you a variable called $stdout, which you can assign to local variable and treat it like a file. If you would rather not print messages out during the test, then you can just temporarily assign $stdout to nil.

pjmlp2• 9 years ago

I agree that compile to binary languages are better for distribution

Personally I think the wide adoption of JVM, CLR, Python, Ruby,..., alongside the demise of languages like Delphi, helped fortify C and C++ place at begining of this century.

For many people, they became the only two languages they knew that were capable of producing binaries, unaware of other options.

Thankfully the tide is turning.

As for Ruby, I always felt the community could have learned from Dylan and implemented a proper AOT compiler, for a while RubyMotion seemed to be that one.

Now we have to bet on Crystal it seems.

vidarh3• 9 years ago

and implemented a proper AOT compiler

Ruby is fundamentally hard to AOT compile efficiently (that's part of the fun I have of trying to compile it...). Part of the challenge is that the moment you allow eval() you have to include a JIT anyway.

Even without it, something as basic as "require" (to load modules/include files) in the typical Ruby install has been overridden by bundler and/or Rubygems to dynamically alter what will get loaded, and e.g. a variety of patterns involve dynamically altering the load path based on directory content.

Something as "simple" as generating a staticaly linked binary out of a Ruby program involves solving the halting problem (e.g. your program could wait for user input to decide which file to load) or making decisions that makes your compiled binary act different to how the interpreter would.

Basically, to statically link Ruby you have pretty much two choices: Make a new language, like Crystal, or determine the minimum set of limitations / changes to Ruby semantics to make it viable to compile with the lowest amount of breakage. I'm trying for the latter, but who knows, something like Crystal might turn out to be the better option. It's certainly a simpler option.

A large part of the problem is that Ruby grew organically based on an interpreter rather than being designed with compilation in mind.

squar1sm3• 9 years ago

I probably wasn't being clear about STDOUT on the ruby version. I just didn't do it in this particular project for the ruby version. I just tested that the flags didn't throw anything. I had tests on other production tools and yeah $stdout saving is nice.

Someone mentioned on reddit me about a CLI testing framework that perhaps does a more holistic job of testing STDOUT.

--> https://bitheap.org/cram/

it's written in python but it's not for python projects per se.

andrew_wc_brown• 9 years ago

Won't have to learn GoLang or Elxir. Crystal on Rails!

ch4s32• 9 years ago

I can't speak for GoLang, but Elixir isn't exactly a straight replacement for Ruby the way Crystal(more or less) is, it makes a lot different promises, and makes different assumptions. It looks familiar, but is paradigmatically quite different. If you are interested in FP, Elixir is a great way to get started.

Crystal seems quite nice though.

holydude• 9 years ago

Crystal also is not Ruby 2.0. It just feels like Ruby the same way RubyMotion feels just like Ruby. But it is not Ruby per se. Nonetheless Crystal really looks cool!

amorphid• 9 years ago

Elixir feels nothing like Ruby to me, except for some superficial similarities in the syntax.

dopamean• 9 years ago

Mike Perham ported some of Sidekiq to Crystal and did brief writeup about it [0]. It'll be interesting to see if this thing really goes somewhere.

[0] http://www.mikeperham.com/2016/05/25/sidekiq-for-crystal/

hashkb2• 9 years ago

Using rubygems to distribute ruby code is sometimes done but then sometimes it’s frowned upon

Wat? Rails?

jdminhbg• 9 years ago

The author means as a means to distribute programs and executables, not libraries.

squar1sm3• 9 years ago

Yeah, that's what I meant. :)

raesene6• 9 years ago

There are some other options for this like Travelling Ruby

http://phusion.github.io/traveling-ruby/

base• 9 years ago

Do you know if with Travelling Ruby is possible to create a windows executable with a GUI? I have been using the gem ocra + ruby tk for this.

wiremine• 9 years ago

If you're a Ruby dev, it's worth your time checking out Crystal. As others have pointed out, it isn't a one-to-one replacement for Ruby, but if you enjoy the Ruby syntax and general way of approaching problems, Crystal is a handy tool.

I've been playing around with it for a a while, and really enjoy it.

That said, if you hate Ruby, keep walking...

tomc1985• 9 years ago

Doesn't homebrew require git?

nerdponx• 9 years ago

It does. But macOS comes with Git so Homebrew works without any dev setup.

dejv• 9 years ago

Is there any library for writing UI for desktop apps available?

RX142• 9 years ago

There's libui bindings in a shard here: https://github.com/Fusion/libui.cr

diminish• 9 years ago

From Ruby to ES6 or Elixir or Crystal or Golang or even maybe Rust? We need comparison of the target languages among themselves.

For example Crystal vs. Elixir.

Does Crystal have A framework like Phoenix or Rails?

RX142• 9 years ago

Currently crystal doesn't have a large "standard" framework like Elixir or Ruby. There's Kemal, which is what most people use to create web applications in Crystal, however its quite small in scope compared to the previous two mentioned frameworks.

I'm sure large, opinionated frameworks will appear for Crystal but in the meanwhile Crystal and its community are just finding their feet and experimenting with what feels natural in Crystal and what doesn't. Once that's done, I'm sure that knowledge can be crystallized (heh) into a framework like Rails.

catnaroek• 9 years ago

For some reason, I zeroth thought the title meant “Porting MRI to Crystal”, which would have been truly awesome.

petre• 9 years ago

Does Crystal produce static binaries like Go does or do I have to mess with dynamic library hell?

Svenskunganka• 9 years ago

It produces static binaries like Go does yes.

grosser• 9 years ago

https://github.com/grosser/rubinjam is a super simple way to convert most Ruby gems into a universal binaries. Which is what this whole post was about :)

Porting Ruby to Crystal

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