Ruby Weekly Issue 574: October 14, 2021

#574 — October 14, 2021

Embracing Infinite Loops with Ruby and Polyphony — See how infinite loops can be used as the basis for long running concurrent tasks here with Polyphony, a io_uring/libev oriented concurrency library, doing the heavy lifting.

Sharon Rosner

▶ 39 Talks from RubyKaigi Takeout 2021 — The popular RubyKaigi conference usually takes place in Japan each year but was held online again due to the ongoing world health problems. A wide array of both English and Japanese talks happened, including these:

Building a new JIT Compiler inside CRuby by Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert.
A look at Rucy: A way to compile Ruby into BPF by Uchio Kondo.
Crafting exploits, tools and havoc with Ruby by Mauro Eldritch.
Parallel testing with Ractors by Vinicius Stock.

RubyKaigi

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Ruby2JS 4.2.0: A Ruby to JavaScript Transpiler — A transpiler aimed at keeping your code looking ‘hand crafted’ rather than merely transpiled. There’s a live demo if you want to see it in action.

Sam Ruby and Jared White

QUICK BITS:

RubyGems 3.2.29 has been released.
Gift Egwuenu shares the latest monthly update from the RubyGems project focused around the release of RubyGems 3.2.27 and 3.2.28 and Bundler 2.2.27 and 2.2.28.
The Gosu Ruby game jam, which we mentioned last week, starts in just two days.
RubyMine 2021.3 EAP3 has been released with editor performace improvements and more RBS-powered inspections.

A Ruby One-Liners Cookbook — Ruby is a fantastic language for one-liners, whether in IRB or even from the command line. This cookbook is an extension of a epic list of them we’ve shared before, and it relates to our Tip of the Week further down this issue too :-)

Sundeep Agarwal

Jobs

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📕 Articles & Tutorials

Upgrading to Zeitwerk — A walkthrough of what’s involved in upgrading a Rails 6 app from classic to Zeitwork mode, if you haven’t taken on Zeitwerk yet.

Simon Chiu

Ruby Safe Navigation — Using the lonely (or safe) operator (&.) says some things about your code that you may not realize and, once you do, there may be a better way to say them.

Joël Quenneville

Using DynamoDB in Your Rails App — Julie introduces DynamoDB and its concepts then closes by showing how using it can feel very much like Active Record.

Julie Kent

A Way to Detect Early Returns from a Block — An interesting little technique the author discovered via this Rails PR.

Ben Sheldon

▶ Discussing Polished Ruby Programming with Jeremy Evans — Jeremy joins the Rogues to discuss his new book, Polished Ruby Programming, and his opinions on and best practices for Ruby development.

Ruby Rogues Podcast podcast

▶ A Team Looks at Reducing Memory Bloat in a Rails App — A team has shared an 11-minute, originally internal-use-only, video of a post mortem of a Rails memory bloat issue they experienced.

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Organizing Business Logic in Rails with Contexts — Josef takes on the age-old conundrum of models vs service objects, adding a new take he gleaned from working with the Phoenix framework.

Josef Strzibny

▶ Discussing the Organization of Large Rails Apps with Jared White

Code with Jason Podcast podcast

▶ How to Use Bootstrap with CSS Bundling in Rails
Go Rails

🛠 Code & Tools

redis-rb 4.5: The Ruby Client Library for Redis — The official Ruby client for the Redis data structure server. 4.5 adds support for a variety of command introduced in Redis 6.2 like ZRANDMEMBER, ZMSCORE and SMISMEMBER.

Redis

JRuby 9.3.1.0 Released — The latest release of the Ruby 2.6.x compatible line of the JVM-based Ruby implementation.

JRuby Core Team

A Better Way to Index Your Postgres Database: pganalyze Index Advisor — Paste your query and schema data and the free pganalyze Index Advisor recommends the ideal index for your query.

pganalyze sponsor

Informers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing for Ruby — You can do sentiment analysis, question answering, name-entity recognition, and the latest feature is text generation.

Andrew Kane

benchmark-ips: 'Iterations Per Second' Benchmarking for Ruby — Improves the standard Benchmark functionality.

Evan Phoenix

DeadEnd: Searches for Unexpected end Syntax Errors — This is a very specific tool, but if unmatched ends are a particular bugbear of yours..

ZomboCom

Xcodeproj: Create and Modify Xcode Projects from Ruby
CocoaPods

💡 Tip of the Week

Ruby's `-e` and `-c` command line options

You will be familiar with running Ruby code saved in a file from the command line using ruby filename.rb. You'll also be familiar, especially if you follow along with the Tip of the Week!, with running snippets of code within different Ruby REPLs, such as irb, pry, rails c or something else.

We can also run small snippets by passing the -e flag to ruby from the command line. For instance:

$ ruby -e "puts 1 + 3"
4

The -e flag can come in handy if we're looking for a specific method, or just need a quick calculation, and don't necessarily need to open up a full REPL.

This guide to Ruby 'one liners' provides a vast array of ways to use the -e flag along with others to achieve quite complex outcomes from the command line or shell script.

Another useful flag is -c which will do a Ruby syntax check on a file without actually executing the file. I find this useful when resolving git merge conflicts, as a way to double check that I haven't left any stray lines in my Ruby files. For instance:

$ ruby -c some_file.rb
some_file.rb:1: syntax error, unexpected end-of-input

The -e and -c flags are two of many which we can use when running ruby from the command line. To see more options, run man ruby from the command line, and we will cover some more interesting ones in coming weeks too.

This week’s tip was written by Jemma Issroff.

🕰 ICYMI (Some older stuff that may catch your eye...)

If you want to use Ruby to consume ML models, then serving Tensorflow over gRPC and generating a Ruby client from the protobufs is one way to do that.
Here's a 3-part series that covers the strategy, management, and tooling of a major (a million+ lines of code) Rails upgrade (from 4 to 5, in this case.)
Seeing how Rails makes some of its syntactic sugar will probably give you some inspiration to create your own. Is too much sugar a bad thing?
Logging URI Query Params with Lograge is probably a bit more involved than you might initially guess.
Matt Swanson highlights how to run different ActiveRecord validations based on context.
Does Rails owe its approach to an art philosophy that emerged at the end of WWII? Maybe. Regardless, this is an interesting read.

Ruby's -e and -c command line options

Ruby's `-e` and `-c` command line options