Talks
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Summarized using AI
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
by Zachary ScottIn the talk titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" presented by Zachary Scott at RubyConf AU 2014, the speaker explores the significance of the Ruby standard library and its historical context. He emphasizes the wealth of knowledge encapsulated in the libraries used in Ruby development, which have been foundational since before the advent of RubyGems.
Key Points Discussed:
- Historical Context of Ruby: Zach discusses how Ruby libraries evolved over time, mentioning pivotal contributions like setup.rb by Minoru Aoki-san, which simplified library installation and distribution.
- Ruby Standard Library: The standard library, which comprises around 70MB of code released with Ruby installations, aims to alleviate the once daunting task of finding and verifying libraries. He highlights its crucial role in modern Ruby development.
- Libraries Highlighted: Three specific libraries from the standard library are showcased:
- DRb (Distributed Ruby): Introduced for easy distribution of code and commands over a network. Zach demonstrates how to develop a simple chat server using DRb, illustrating its ability to handle user connections and message distribution with concise code.
- RDoc: A tool for generating documentation in Ruby, which now supports Markdown. The simplicity of parsing Markdown into HTML using RDoc is demonstrated, highlighting its utility in making documentation user-friendly.
- Fiddle: A library that allows interaction with code written in other languages. Zach explains how Fiddle enables seamless communication between Ruby and other languages like Dylan, showcasing how simple it is to create and wrap functions for cross-language interactions.
- Community and Evolution: Zach reflects on the Ruby community's growth and the impact of tools like Bundler on developers' productivity, emphasizing the potential for any Rubyist to contribute to the ecosystem.
Conclusions and Takeaways:
- The evolution of libraries in Ruby has significantly improved development efficiency and accessibility.
- Understanding and utilizing the standard library is vital for Ruby developers to leverage the foundational tools available to them.
- The ongoing evolution of these libraries points to an inspiring future for Ruby, driven by community contributions and innovations.
00:00:08.480
Welcome! I'm Zach. Thanks for the introduction, Josh. You're amazing.
00:00:14.920
My whole talk is just about Josh. It's a whole lie.
00:00:20.480
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of Ruby, the standard library, and where things might be.
00:00:36.399
My slides are cut off. Starting off with a pain.
00:00:44.399
There we go. Okay, so I'm going to show you three libraries that I've picked from the standard library.
00:00:49.840
One of them is DRb, another one's RDoc, and Fiddle as you can read. I hope you can read this.
00:01:01.280
The title is 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants'. I decided on this title because it sounds witty.
00:01:07.280
And honestly, I give myself credit for that.
00:01:18.560
So this is my first time in Australia, and I'm pretty excited! There's a lot of amazing Rubyists here.
00:01:25.360
It's kind of shocking to see such a great community here. The core is good.
00:01:31.920
I've met a number of you in other places, but it's nice to now be here on your soil and hang out with you.
00:01:43.119
Um...
00:01:48.479
So, is this going to happen the whole time?
00:01:57.040
What's the problem?
00:02:09.280
Almond, help me out!
00:02:14.959
I mean, you plug it in and it sets it automatically.
00:02:20.480
You did? Yeah, but that's not full screen, bro.
00:02:36.959
Hey, okay. Thank you.
00:02:42.160
So, where the last talk was interesting, it gave me a lot of material because I didn't really prepare this talk very well.
00:02:48.080
I was kind of up late and had a really not-so-great day yesterday.
00:02:53.360
But all that aside, I think it's really important to think about where we might be going in Ruby.
00:02:59.200
That was a great indicator of things that we should work on and areas we need to focus on as a community.
00:03:04.560
He made a really great point that the number of core people influencing these changes is very small.
00:03:10.239
However, as a group, we can make a huge difference.
00:03:17.680
I also liked that he mentioned Bundler, and Andre's here. Bundler's awesome.
00:03:25.280
There are a few other Bundler people here too; this is basically Bundler ZackConf.
00:03:31.360
I've decided Holmen's up next and his mom's here— that's awesome!
00:03:50.319
So, what am I getting at? Right now, literally anyone in here can write a library for Ruby.
00:03:56.640
They can push it to RubyGems, and within seconds, millions can download your code, install it, and have it right on their computer.
00:04:02.400
That's really amazing if you think about how far we've come with Bundler.
00:04:08.400
With literally one command and a Gemfile, you can install hundreds of libraries on your computer with one command.
00:04:16.639
After several hours of resolving, but we're getting there, and it's amazing.
00:04:23.919
I don't know what the point is, or where we're actually going, but I don't think anyone does.
00:04:29.520
We're just going to keep working at it and see where we go.
00:04:34.560
That, in itself, is really inspiring.
00:04:39.680
But with that, we have to think about where we've been.
00:04:45.440
All these tools we have are great and make our lives easier.
00:04:52.240
But there definitely was a time when we didn't have these luxuries.
00:04:57.840
Even before Ruby, when you were just writing C, packaging was a challenge.
00:05:04.320
A lot of this has been solved with Ruby and RubyGems.
00:05:10.880
There was a time when we didn't have RubyGems, and we had to pass libraries around over the Internet.
00:05:17.919
It was similar to what gems do now but far less efficient.
00:05:26.479
We had this guy, Minoru Aoki-san, who is the author of the Ruby Hacking Guide.
00:05:33.039
He also wrote setup.rb.
00:05:38.080
Setup.rb allowed you to have a program or a library with helpful methods.
00:05:41.918
You could easily install a program on your computer.
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If you know Python, they had a similar process where you used 'python setup.py' or similar.
00:05:54.720
Back then, we had no automation.
00:06:00.320
You had to download the library and run a file manually.
00:06:08.400
Before that, we had RIA, the Ruby Application Archive, which basically functioned like a wiki.
00:06:14.319
You would attach a link to a tarball of your library, and people would download it manually.
00:06:20.640
There were no servers or cloud systems.
00:06:27.280
Everything was done manually.
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This was like 17 years ago; setup.rb was first released 17 years ago.
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Ruby Application Archive started 16 years ago shortly after.
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Once we had an installer, the challenge was how to pass it around.
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It's sad to see RIA go down because that box was lost.
00:07:00.000
But it's interesting to see where we've come from and where we're going, all because of that guy.
00:07:11.039
The standard library exists because of the huge burden it once was on developers.
00:07:17.520
They struggled to find trustworthy libraries from wikis.
00:07:23.039
Verifying if a tarball worked was difficult; verifying its integrity was done manually.
00:07:28.960
Hence, libraries were included in Ruby to ease development.
00:07:36.560
It's still going strong. Mark Bates mentioned in his talk that Minitest is still included in Ruby.
00:07:44.640
The three libraries I'm going to show you are still included in Ruby and useful today.
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This isn't going to be a talk about best practice libraries.
00:07:55.840
Some of this stuff is just plain useless, to be frank, but it's cool, and I want to share it.
00:08:11.640
The first library I have is DRb, which was written by this guy about 10 years ago.
00:08:17.200
It started as a plugin for the original Webrick servlet in Ruby.
00:08:23.920
He wanted a way to distribute code and commands over the network.
00:08:30.160
There's a great book on it, I think it's literally called 'The DRb Book'.
00:08:34.880
It's published by Pragmatic Programmers.
00:08:40.159
What I want to build is a chat server using DRb.
00:08:46.640
I thought it would be great if we could all connect and chat.
00:08:52.800
However, you can't do that due to the flaky network here, and ports are blocked.
00:09:09.920
So, I'm going to start by writing my server.
00:09:16.720
This server will accept connections over the network and distribute messages.
00:09:24.000
I'm going to use a class to allow DRb to connect to remote objects.
00:09:29.600
When initializing, we can't misspell 'messages', so we create hashes for both messages and users.
00:09:34.320
When accepting a connection, we'll add a user object to our hash.
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I’ll show you what the client will look like next.
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Basically, we want to initialize a new client with this remote connection and store it.
00:09:59.680
We also want to return that so we can call methods on it.
00:10:08.560
This way, we get our client instance back and can call methods once the connection is open.
00:10:15.680
Finally, we want to distribute messages over TCP.
00:10:23.600
We'll pass messages to the remote connection.
00:10:30.920
To set up the username, when we get that connection back, I can just call the username method.
00:10:39.760
The user is a very basic object with just a username and a method to write strings to the screen.
00:10:46.680
That's the basic idea of our server, and with not even 20 lines of code, we can handle connections.
00:10:52.960
Now there's no actual DRb in this class, which is interesting, but that will handle the client connection.
00:11:04.800
So, let's write our client.
00:11:09.920
In the client class, we need to require DRb and the server we just wrote.
00:11:18.240
Our client class will set up our connection.
00:11:24.800
We do this by storing the username here too.
00:11:31.360
The client is the class that initializes the connection to the server.
00:11:36.000
When we want to distribute a message, we also need to pass that back to the class we wrote earlier.
00:11:44.480
The message resembles a chat message.
00:11:51.040
So we take the remote connection and pass in the message.
00:11:56.000
Now we also want to implement a way to take a message— just a string that we pass along.
00:12:02.640
We'll do this with 'server.remote.say(message)'.
00:12:09.840
Now we need to connect the DRb instance.
00:12:15.360
Using 'start_service', we pass it the URI.
00:12:22.480
We want to initialize the server object and then simply join the threads.
00:12:28.240
'Start_service' takes a URI and listens on that address. You can just pass nil.
00:12:35.000
This uses an underlying DRb method to determine the default port and address for running on Linux.
00:12:41.760
But just for sanity’s sake, I'm going to do it this way.
00:12:47.360
User will also be a simple class with a username. We just set that in the initializer.
00:12:52.560
And we just want to include a method to say messages.
00:12:59.760
This isn't exactly the most complicated Ruby I've ever written, but it gets the job done.
00:13:04.080
Here comes the fun part! This is where we write the chat itself.
00:13:11.760
We have all these classes in place and services connected; we now need to initialize the chat.
00:13:19.440
I'll require DRb again and that user class.
00:13:26.560
Basic Ruby now asks, 'what's your name?' We then simply get that input.
00:13:34.560
Now we have the username, and we want to start up DRb again.
00:13:41.920
We initialize the remote connection by calling DRbObject.new, passing in the URI.
00:13:48.080
So this takes two parameters: the first is the local object, and the second is the URI.
00:13:55.680
We're using the main server node for communication.
00:14:01.920
One thing I forgot to add to the client is how these objects are stored on the server.
00:14:08.760
When communicating, we want to pass along only a reference, not the entire object.
00:14:14.400
The user will have to be treated the same as it connects.
00:14:21.600
I’m not sure if I need to pass remote for the user; I must check.
00:14:27.880
So you call 'client.rb' and let’s see what happens.
00:14:34.560
Brother, I know. I just need to see if this works.
00:14:41.440
So let’s figure this out with the functionality.
00:14:48.800
Yay! It is done, and now it’s running on time.
00:14:55.200
The next one is RDoc by this guy, Eric Hodel.
00:15:02.240
He's a maintainer and really knows a lot about Ruby core.
00:15:09.920
What I want to show you with RDoc is that it comes with a markdown parser.
00:15:16.720
With RDoc4, it now supports markdown.
00:15:24.560
I'll write it as if we're using RDoc; it has a similar API.
00:15:31.679
You simply initialize a markdown object and call 'to_html' with some text.
00:15:38.360
So, literally about 15 lines of code gives us a markdown parser.
00:15:44.960
I'm going to read from standard input, convert a markdown file to HTML.
00:15:52.320
To do this, I'll initialize a new markdown instance and pass in standard input.
00:15:59.920
Then, I'll just output the HTML, simple as that.
00:16:07.440
Hey Charlie, is the ruby README in RDoc for markdown yet?
00:16:14.720
Never mind, I'll just use Rails.
00:16:20.720
If I call the README from Rails, and pipe that to RDoc, it outputs HTML.
00:16:27.440
We can save that to an HTML file, open index.html, and see the Rails README formatted.
00:16:35.240
That’s how easy it is!
00:16:41.840
This next one's going to be a trick, but how much time do I have?
00:16:47.440
Great, sorry Homan; love you, Homan's mom.
00:16:54.720
Alright, Fiddle is an amazing library. Originally, it started as an extension.
00:17:02.000
For DL, which is how we used to link libraries in Ruby.
00:17:08.640
DL is an old way to link libraries at a low level.
00:17:15.120
A few years later, FFI came along, which is way more standardized.
00:17:22.240
Aaron wrapped this as Fiddle, bridging the old with the new.
00:17:29.440
The great thing about Fiddle is that you can communicate across languages, libraries, etc.
00:17:37.200
I'd love to show you how to talk to Dylan.
00:17:44.720
Dylan is a statically compiled language, purely object-oriented.
00:17:51.600
Apple started it as an experiment for the Newton platform.
00:17:57.520
After it failed, CMU rewrote the compiler in Unix standard.
00:18:04.960
Now, we have the open Dylan implementation with tons of amazing libraries on GitHub.
00:18:10.960
I’m going to write something basic to show you.
00:18:17.760
It takes two integers and returns their sum, a plus b.
00:18:24.960
To make this callable from C, I’ll load the CFFI extension from Dylan.
00:18:31.520
Now we have to create a wrapper function.
00:18:36.640
This allows us to represent the parameters as types.
00:18:42.480
This represents a, b, and c, which is the result.
00:18:50.080
Now, we’ll give this function a name that we can access— let's call it 'adder'.
00:18:56.800
That’s really basic— defining the function and wrapping it.
00:19:02.240
Now, I'm compiling this quickly. Hope I have a minute.
00:19:08.960
While it's compiling, let's check out the Fiddle implementation in Ruby.
00:19:15.360
I’ll attach the Fiddle function I just wrote and use the adder function.
00:19:22.880
It takes two integers as arguments and returns a single integer.
00:19:30.080
Now, we can call it, 'Dylan.adder(2, 2)'.
00:19:36.400
If this compiled correctly, we should get a result.
00:19:41.920
I'm sure you get the idea without needing the specifics of the output.
00:19:48.720
This is all great, so check out Fiddle, Ruby, and Dylan.
00:19:55.520
And that’s all I have.
00:19:58.160
Although Zach likes to run over, I have time for one question in 140 characters or less.
00:20:04.960
Any questions for Mr. Zach?
00:20:11.599
Well, okay, thank you very much!
00:20:19.520
Oh, when you move into a new neighborhood you have to register the neighbors.
00:20:25.119
Thank you very much, Mark, for that great input! It's good! Thank you, Zach!
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