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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

pretty slick I'm sure, I took my learnings from Spinel and started building my own little language that can do all it can and more tbh with Fable and now Astra haha

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:

the library-support wall is the recurring one for anything ruby or python shaped targeting workers. building a pdf filler for that runtime hits the same wall, native libs and headless chrome are dead on arrival, so you reimplement in pure js or wasm, exactly the compile-test pain you're describing.

For Ruby you have HexaPDF which is pure Ruby and can fill PDFs.

HexaPDF's a good shout, one of the few pure-ruby libs that handles AcroForm signing right. haven't tested it against hybrid AcroForm/XFA forms though (IRS 1040, USCIS) where most non-adobe fillers fill AcroForm and silently drop XFA on save. does HexaPDF touch XFA at all?