Post

Fresco is a ruby-framework that compiles down to a binary via Spinel (matz/spinel). It's super early, but I have something cobbled together that seems to work (and not segfault every fifteen minutes!) Fresco is fresh, it's new and it's inspired by Hanami and @hanakai.org

There is a _lot_ to do still before it's really usable for production. But it's fast! I'm iterating on it fast too. Two links: github.com/afomera/fresco github.com/afomera/fres... The example repo has the app I've been building as I've been making fresco, there are sharp edges of course.

I knew you'd done something with Spinel so had to dig through your post history. Thoughts on spinel? Particularly the limitations for web apps?

that said the main issue I felt when trying it for a web app was the a) lack of library support and b) the pain of needing to compile it to test it between changes, but if you can keep writing CRuby that is compatible ala my fresco thing did, you can get the best of both worlds imo

Yeah, currently got Fable building out some experiments in the direction of “Cloudflare Workers but make it spin(el)”. So far, so ridiculously fast but definitely a few gotchas

my thought last night was… Ruby (and Rails) are in danger because I've started mostly not caring what the implementation language or framework is for small utility apps. I mostly just use Cloudflare Workers now, which got me thinking: if I want to preserve Ruby, can I make it a serverless language?

spinel is fast-as-fuck though—plenty fast enough to start with. Serving a calendar app using SQLite:

yeah that's bad ass. two years ago I would have been in the no other language but ruby camp, but these days I use whatever gets it done. It's not uncommon to have an LLM produce ruby, javascript, rust, swift, and kotlin for me on various projects. ruby-style languages on cloudflare workers... +1

ruby.wasm already gets you cruby compiled to wasm running in workers via the wasm bindings, no need to invent a new language for it. cold start on the wasm blob is the real tax, not the language semantics

In most cases I’ve considered, if you have to use wasm to run Ruby on a platform then you negate the advantages of that platform (Cloudflare workers, the browser etc). WASM is cool but is almost always the wrong solution

sure can do that. But there's learnings to be had and fun on the other side that I don't get with wasm. Not trying to make it big with my lil fun programming language :)