Skip to main content

Opal - Ruby to JavaScript compiler

So I just found out about the Opal Ruby to JavaScript compiler and I am very intrigued.

http://opalrb.org/

So for a few years now, the Ruby community has been encouraged to use CoffeeScript as a JavaScript "alternative" (http://coffeescript.org/) but for some reason, as an avid JavaScript programmer, it never appealed to me. CoffeeScript offers a small amount of syntactic sugar on top of JavaScript, but it never seemed worth the learning curve for me to take it on. I don't actually mind JS's brackets (as they let you know where things begin and end cleanly) and significant white space in a programming language has always seemed like a bad idea too (it's bad enough that a misplaced semicolon can stop a program from running properly, but try searching for an extra white space character you can't even see!).

Opal on the other hand, is actually Ruby compiled to JavaScript (not Ruby/Python-ish syntax). It looks, feels, and even smells like Ruby because it is. The JavaScript it generates might be a little more verbose than that generated by CoffeeScript, but that's because it has to do more (Ruby and JavaScript are separate languages in the proper sense, not different dialects). It does however compile out its classes using the module pattern which means it is safely scoped (http://toddmotto.com/mastering-the-module-pattern/).

It also has a "Native" bridge to interact with regular JavaScript which helps maintain clean separation (http://opalrb.org/docs/interacting_with_javascript/) as well as RSpec support for testing. It even supports method_missing.

In any case, there are many other interesting things about it, which I won't go into here.

It will be interesting to see where it leads...

PS I see Opal as being more like ASM.js (http://asmjs.org/) than CoffeeScript. It can actually use a quite limited subset of JS in order to be functional.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Master of my domain

Hi All, I just got myself a new domain ( http://www.skuunk.com ). The reason is that Blogspot.com is offering cheap domain via GoDaddy.com and I thought after having this nickname for nigh on 10 years it was time to buy the domain before someone else did (also I read somewhere that using blogspot.com in your domain is the equivalent of an aol.com or hotmail.com email address...shudder...). Of course I forgot that I would have to re-register my blog everywhere (which is taking ages) not to mention set up all my stats stuff again. *sigh*. It's a blogger's life... In any case, don't forget to bookmark the new address and to vote me up on Technorati !
Post a Comment
Read more

Freezing Gems

What is a gem and why would you want to freeze it? In Ruby, there are times when you want to access pieces of functionality that other people of written (3rd party libraries) and you normally have 2 options. You can install a plug in or install a gem. Normally the method you use is determined by which ever is made available by the author. Gems are installed on the host machine and are pretty handy when you want to run things in the command line or else across lots of projects, but their downside is that if you use a gem in a Rails project there is no automatic publishing mechanism when you deploy your site. You will need to log onto the remote host machine and install the gem manually. Plugins are specific to Rails and are similar to gems in that they are also 3rd party libraries. However they are associated with your Rails project as opposed to your machine so they will get posted to the server on a regular deploy. Freezing a gem is the process of transforming a gem into a plug in. Es...
22 comments
Read more

Elixir - destructuring, function overloading and pattern matching

Why am I covering 3 Elixir topics at once? Well, perhaps it is to show you how the three are used together. Individually, any of these 3 are interesting, but combined, they provide you with a means of essentially getting rid of conditionals and spaghetti logic. Consider the following function. def greet_beatle(person) do case person.first_name do "John" -> "Hello John." "Paul" -> "Good day Paul." "George" -> "Georgie boy, how you doing?" "Ringo" -> "What a drummer!" _-> "You are not a Beatle, #{person.first_name}" end end Yeah, it basically works, but there is a big old case statement in there. If you wanted to do something more as well depending on the person, you could easily end up with some spaghetti logic. Let's see how we can simplify this a little. def greet_beatle(%{first_name: first_name}) do case first_name d...
Post a Comment
Read more