Stream: show and tell

Topic: ruby interop

Richard Feldman (Nov 04 2022 at 02:52):

this is really cool: the Ruby interop example now uses JSON as a quick-and-dirty way to send arbitrary values between Roc and Ruby:

• the platform's API says "give me a main that takes a type that can be decoded, and returns a type that can be encoded, and I'll take care of the rest
• the app's main argument and return value can be pretty much any Roc type that doesn't contain a function (since those can't be serialized as JSON) - like in this example where I arbitrarily decided on U64 -> Str
• the Roc platform and the Ruby glue take care of the JSON intermediary part; the Roc application doesn't even mention it

Richard Feldman (Nov 04 2022 at 02:52):

shoutout to @Ayaz Hafiz for getting the "automatic JSON encoding and decoding" working that facilitates this!

Richard Feldman (Nov 04 2022 at 02:53):

we can make a fancier platform in the future which supports going directly to Ruby types without the JSON intermediary, and which can support sending functions to Ruby and so on...but this gets a ton of the way there, and it only took me a few minutes to change from sending strings to Ruby to sending automatically serialized near-arbitrary Roc types via JSON!

Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 04 2022 at 02:57):

So for the extra cost of encoding and decoding you get a super flexible API
..that's really cool

Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 04 2022 at 03:03):

wow, and this works without any compiler panics??

Richard Feldman (Nov 04 2022 at 04:08):

yup!

Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 04 2022 at 04:09):

we're getting really good at this programming language thing

Richard Feldman (Nov 04 2022 at 04:09):

granted, a proper glue implementation would be faster, and more flexible...and probably take more like a week of work :big_smile:

Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC