From Rust to Ruby

This defies belief. “I wanted to scratch a technical itch. My local AI completed the job in 30 minutes. I never pressed Start to see if it works, but I did write a blog post about it…”

At first I thought this would be an interesting article, but as soon as they mentioned using an LLM to do the conversion I lost all interest. It's like saying "I wanted this done so I got my underling to do it, here is my story...". Like why would I bother to read it then, as it was clearly not you doing the conversion or putting any thought into it.

Hey I'm in the same boat!

I love Go and Rust, they're wonderful languages with their own ups and downs. Sadly I never was able to build a SaaS app with either. Something about a square peg and a round hole... I could be very wrong, but there's a lot of gadgets that come with a SaaS tool, and I'm not inventing them.

RoR is.. "good enough". I can opt-in types whenever, I can build things quick, the tooling is alright, etc.

My first real job was PHP, and there were just too many gotchas there. Ruby seems to steer a bit more towards ecommerce, which intruiged me. And its good enough for Shopify, so...

Curious if there are folks (perhaps from ruby community) using crystal for medium/large projects. How has your experience been?

I recently tried it out in a hobby project and was pleasantly surprised at how smooth the overall DX was, and how little memory it consumed.

I'm not sure any language + framework prioritizes developer happiness as much as Ruby on Rails.

I built a set of gems (propel_rails) that takes the already terse Ruby on Rails code to the next extreme. It generates a set of top level classes like an API controller and some concerns that then create a full restful resource (model, controller, serializer, unit and e2e tests) with 0 boilerplate code. The controller ends up being only a list of all permitted attributes the api will accept because the restful actions are automatically generated. It’s a bit hard to fully describe but the meta programming power of Ruby really does make amazing things easy.

If you can switch from Rust to Ruby, and it would make sense, choosing Rust in the beginning was a mistake.

I'm sometimes amazed by project sizes, a 30k line codebase is small? I'm aware that the ceiling is high but 30k lines of code can encode so much information and behavioural nuance.

Maybe this is just my backend/network focus with Golang though. Scaling beyond 10-15k lines of code always was quite intimidating as it is usually where I lose the ability to just keep a model of the codebase fully in my head.

People think Ruby is slower than Rust, they'll be surprised to know Ruby is actually now faster than python but slower than Go or Rust.

I do wonder if it'll ever be possible to get Rust tests to feel as nice to write as, say, test suites in Python or Ruby. I might just be missing a lot of helpers, but a part of me really wants to use a test metalanguage that (for example) RC's everything, gives me implicit casts from strings to what ever type I need, and a bunch of other stuff.

I've always found Rust object buildup to be pretty annoying.

>But before I did so I researched first. I asked a few instances to analyse the project in terms of gains of complexity, stability, testability, etc., and while (obviously) stability would drop (no types in Ruby) it’s not that awful (Sorbet has types in Ruby!).

Is it not a rage-bait argument to say that not having types implies less stability?

To count lines of rust code:

fd . -e rs -uu | xargs cat | wc -l

Why not just:

find . -name '*.rs' | xargs wc -l

From whatever to Go ... hype!

From Go to Rust ... hype!

From Rust to Ruby ... the new hype!?

> So in the end it seems I have (licks finger and turns to the wind) 1.47x better outcomes if the app were a Ruby on Rails app instead.

Am I reading this right... did this number just come out of thin air?

Is this just generated based on the vibes of the AI?

Also, to just add them up and compare them like that is just compounding nonsense on nonsense.

"I have no idea if it works or not because I haven’t yet tried running it. But it's 5x shorter!"

Next try Elixir.

> So I had to take a look around to remind myself what Ruby and Ruby on Rails are doing nowadays. They’re doing quite well.

Ah really?

Well ... let's look at TIOBE. Now I am aware that TIOBE sucks, it makes little sense, but even with that in mind, the claim that ruby is doing that well is simply factually WRONG, at the least right now:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Ruby is ranked 23.

Rust is ranked 15.

Again, TIOBE has tons of issues, people pointed that out, but I am pointing here more at a trend. If you look at the graph:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ruby/

It is more obvious.

Now, I think ruby is a great language, I use it daily as the primary glue language to do literally everything. I call it the ultimate wrapper over C, which ruby ultimately is. But the claim "ruby is doing great" is just simply INCORRECT. And we haven't even gotten to RubyCentral mass-purging developers or adding random new corporate-driven rules to rubygems.org and what not. I never understood why I would be under 100k download restrictions when on github I have full control over my own (!!!) code. I call that an illegal hijacking attempt by RubyCentral (this was about a year before they mass-purged developers anyway, so I could nod my head wisely when that happened lateron, even though I had no advance knowledge, but it did not surprise me once the shopify corporate overlord pulled rank; and DHH sitting on the sidelines making joyful comments at the chaotic situation here on his blog. At that time I noticed that DHH indeed became a problem too).

> There are some typing initiatives (Sorbet), and the language itself is terse as ever.

No sane rubyist uses that typing crap, sorry. And matz isn't the biggest fan of slapping down mandatory types onto everything either. People whose brain is addicted to types, want them; I understand that problem. There is no way you can reason with them because they really WANT types. It's like someone starving for food; that person wants food. There is no way around that. Same with types for these people. And they want to change a language to that too. This is the annoying part. Many years ago I was surprised to hear haskell folks not wanting everyone. After that type addiction, I realise the haskell point of view: some people want to ruin languages. (You may debate whether types ruin ruby or not, but the main point here is that some people want to change a language into something that fits their brain more easily. Now I understand the haskell point of view, despite still thinking this is a snobbish elitist view of exclusion. But language integrity is also indeed important, so I understand that point of view these days.)

> while (obviously) stability would drop (no types in Ruby)

Absolute rubbish nonsense. Absolute. Totally incorrect claim made, from A to Z. But again, you can not reason with these type addiction people. Can't they go to PHP or some other language?

Let's reword it more neutrally then. Which claims and proof support the claim that stability drops because of "no types in Ruby"? Because I never ever had that happen in any code I wrote in ruby in the last +20 years. Yes, you need to be able to query what is possible; often you may have to do .is_a? or .respond_to?. Yes, this is not the same as "advance" type checks. I am not saying types are useless either. What I am saying is that the claim of "you lose stability without types" is ABSOLUTELY RUBBISH NONSENSE. But the brain of type-addicted folks is already set towards "types everywhere". This is the problem. They are trapped in their world of assumptions.

> So in the end it seems I have (licks finger and turns to the wind) 1.47x better outcomes if the app were a Ruby on Rails app instead.

Now he is pulling numbers out of ...

> I have a local LLM running on my (bought it for gaming pre-AI craze) 4090 Ti1 - I’m a free man with unlimited tokens2. So I thought: BRING IT ON!

Ah - and AI already deadlocked his brain on top of that. So not even writing any ruby code but just using AI. And using Rails either. Well, you can write web-applications without rails too. And that works extremely well. That also was the first thing I did when I switched from PHP to ruby back then. And I still don't need or use rails either.

> Since it is a relatively small project the conversion took ~30 minutes. I have no idea if it works or not because I haven’t yet tried running it. But there is one thing I checked, and stared at in horror

So he used AI and still has absolutely no idea about anything. These people don't see a problem with that. Oldschool people didn't go that way.

> That’s right folks! 77% decrease in line count; 4.49 lines of Rust code for each line of Ruby.

Well, using python would also have led to a significant decrease, so that is not surprising. C and C++ and Java also require a lot more information. Types in particular require more syntax and words in general, so really - nothing surprising here. That ruby is succinct and still elegant (except for this type crap) is one reason why people often stick to ruby.

> but I must say it’s looking clean and idiomatic for my dated eye.

But he is using AI here. How does he know that it is clean and idiomatic? The ruby code I write is (to me) very simple and straightforward, typical OOP but simple and practical at all times (whenever possible). AI does not generate such code. And a ton of ruby code on the world wide web, written by humans, looks as if someone beat you silly with a club on the head, before you started to write anything. Even well-used projects such as rack - anyone looked at the source code? Or of sinatra? It looks as if someone was drunk when writing the code. I am biased myself though; for instance, I find Jeremy Evans typically writes elegant ruby code. zverok writes fascinating projects, but his writing style is totally alien to me - your mileage may vary. The point is that there is not really a unified "idiomatic" ruby code. Look at this for instance:

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/test/ruby/test_threa...

The code was as follows (the link no longer worked, I bookmarked it some years ago and now I can not find the new code but I assure everyone that this was that way, because I stored it locally):

    t1&.kill&.join

The safe navigation syntax has use cases, I am not denying that either. You can shorten some code significantly. But I find this syntax utterly horrible and decided that my code base will be protected against safe navigation horror.

Of course this is a subjective opinion. But ruby syntax is not automatically great merely because it is ruby. You need to think what you want and even more importantly what you don't want. And why.

> I can add types using Agents, so probably type safety can be alleviated

Yikes. And the worst part is: type-addicted people can not modify their brain. I've never seen a type-loving person abandon this love for types.

> Ruby/Rails is pretty much batteries+kitchen sink included, which beats 3GiB of compiled deps.

Ok. Not disputing that. But that more says a lot about Rust than Ruby really. Because the main question should be why you need so much code in Rust for that.

> Testing will be SO MUCH EASIER

Not disputing that either.

This is probably one of the strangest blog statements I have ever read. I think ruby is a great programming language, but this AI-powered transition is just ... strange. Basically he is not really using ruby. But praises ruby. While having AI generate the code. Am I the only one to find this extremely awkward?

[dead]

Idk why people are shitting on you. So many LLM haters on here. It’s changed the game completely and some people just don’t want to accept it.

I think this is cool. Verbosity of languages is important when it comes to coding with AI. I’ve found Go to be a happy medium.