Posted by matijs
11/12/2021 at 09h26
AsciiDoc is nice because a lot
is possible. However, there are a lot of surprising edge cases that make it
less great as an easy to read and write documentation format.
-
Some list markers support nesting, others do not
If you use a dash (-) as a list marker, that works fine until you want to
create nested lists. Then, it turns out you should be using *.
-
Outdenting lists has very weird syntax.
To outdent a list, you have to add a number of empty lines equal to the
number of outdents plus one, followed by an empty line with a +. This is
too specific for a human-readable format.
-
Escaping only works where it is needed.
Wherever an asterisk leads to bolding, you can escape it using a \ to create a literal
asterisk. However, when the use of an asterisk does not lead to bolding, adding the \
will just lead to a literal \ in the output. Predicting where this will
happen is tricky so you have to constantly look at the actual output.
Tags
asciidoc, processing, software, text
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Posted by matijs
20/03/2020 at 13h08
Automating away your library release process because you find it boring and tedious is the worst thing you can do. People rely on your releases to be meaningful, have meaningful version numbers, and meaningful release notes. Yes, these take time. But your releases are when your users are reminded that you exist. At other times, your library is just quietly doing its thing. Releases are when your users take notice. They want to read your change log, look at the version number to see if they need to pay attention. You’re in the spotlight. This is your performance. Give your releases some love.
Tags
development, software
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Posted by matijs
30/01/2014 at 06h16
These past few days, I’ve been busy updating RipperRubyParser to make it compatible with RubyParser 3. This morning, I discovered that one thing that was changed from RubyParser 2 is the parsing of negations.
Before, !foo was parsed like this:
s(:not, s(:call, nil, :foo))
Now, !foo is parsed like this:
s(:call, s(:call, nil, :foo), :!)
That looks a lot like a method call. Could it be that in fact, it is a method call? Let’s see.
Tags
ruby, software
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Posted by matijs
02/03/2013 at 16h42
Yesterday, I read Alex Gaynor’s slides on dynamic language
speed.
It’s an interesting argument, but I’m not totally convinced.
At a high level, the argument is as follows, it seems:
- For a comparable algorithm, Ruby et al. do much more work behind the
scenes than ‘fast’ languages such as C.
- In particular, they do a lot of memory allocation.
- Therefore, we should add tools to those languages that allow us to do
memory allocation more efficiently.
Tags
benchmarks, ruby, software, speed
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Posted by matijs
17/02/2013 at 20h15
I love Travis CI. I love git bisect. I used both recently to track down
a bug in GirFFI.
Suddenly, builds were failing on JRuby. The problem did not occur on my
own, 64 bit, machine, so it seemed hard to debug. I tried making Travis
use different JVMs, but that didn’t help, apart from crashing in a
different way (faster, too, which was nice).
Building a Travis box
Using the travis-boxes repository, I created a VM as used by Travis.
This is currently not documented well in the READMEs, so I’m writing it
down here, slightly out of order of actual events.
I cloned the following three repositories:
travis-cookbooks
travis-boxes
veewee-definitions
First, I created a base box in veewee-definitions, according to its
README. In this case, I created a precise32 box, since that’s the box
Travis uses for the builds. The final, export, stage creates a
precise32.box file.
Then, I moved the precise32.box file to travis-boxes/boxes, making a
base box available there. There is a Thor task to create just such a
base box right there, but it doesn’t work, and seems to be deprecated
anyway, since veewee is no longer supposed to be used in that
repository.
So, a base box being available in travis-boxes, I used the following to
create a fully functional box for testing Rubies:
bundle exec thor travis:box:build -b precise32 ruby
Oddly, this didn’t produce a box travis-ruby, but it did produce
travis-development, which I could then manipulate using vagrant.
Hunting down the bug
I ssh’d into my fresh travis box using vagrant ssh. After a couple of
minutes getting to know rvm (I use rbenv myself), I was able to confirm
the crash on JRuby. After some initial poking around trying to pin down
the problem to one particular test case and failing, I decided to use
git bisect. As my check I used the test:introspection task, which
reliably crashed when the problem was present.
While it’s possible to automate git bisect, I like to use it manually,
since a particular test used may fail for unrelated reasons. Also, since
git bisect is a really fast process, there is a pleasent lack of tedium.
Anyway, after a couple of iterations, I was able to locate
the problematic commit.
By checking the different bits of the commit I then found the culprit: I
accidentally broke the code that creates layout definitions, in
particular the one used by GValue. Going back to master, I added
a simple test and fix.
I will have to revisit the code later to clean it up and make it more
robust.
Tags
GirFFI, git, github, software, travis
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Posted by matijs
04/11/2012 at 13h34
Once upon a time, there was only UnifiedRuby, a cleaned up
representation of the Ruby AST.
Now, what do we have?
-
RubyParser before version 3; this is the UnifiedRuby format:
RubyParser.new.parse "foobar(1, 2, 3)"
# => s(:call, nil, :foobar, s(:arglist, s(:lit, 1), s(:lit, 2), s(:lit, 3)))
-
RubyParser version 3:
Ruby18Parser.new.parse "foobar(1, 2, 3)"
# => s(:call, nil, :foobar, s(:lit, 1), s(:lit, 2), s(:lit, 3))
Ruby19Parser.new.parse "foobar(1, 2, 3)"
# => s(:call, nil, :foobar, s(:lit, 1), s(:lit, 2), s(:lit, 3))
-
Rubinius; this is basically the UnifiedRuby format, but using Arrays.
"foobar(1,2,3)".to_sexp
# => [:call, nil, :foobar, [:arglist, [:lit, 1], [:lit, 2], [:lit, 3]]]
-
RipperRubyParser; a wrapper around Ripper producing UnifiedRuby:
RipperRubyParser::Parser.new.parse "foobar(1,2,3)"
# => s(:call, nil, :foobar, s(:arglist, s(:lit, 1), s(:lit, 2), s(:lit, 3)))
How do these fare with new Ruby 1.9 syntax? Let’s try hashes. RubyParser
before version 3 and Rubinius (even in 1.9 mode) can’t handle this.
-
RubyParser 3:
Ruby19Parser.new.parse "{a: 1}"
# => s(:hash, s(:lit, :a), s(:lit, 1))
-
RipperRubyParser:
RipperRubyParser::Parser.new.parse "{a: 1}"
# => s(:hash, s(:lit, :a), s(:lit, 1))
And what about stabby lambda’s?
-
RubyParser 3:
Ruby19Parser.new.parse "->{}"
# => s(:iter, s(:call, nil, :lambda), 0, nil)
-
RipperRubyParser:
RipperRubyParser::Parser.new.parse "->{}"
# => s(:iter, s(:call, nil, :lambda, s(:arglist)),
# s(:masgn, s(:array)), s(:void_stmt))
That looks like a big difference, but this is just the degenerate case.
When the lambda has some arguments and a body, the difference is minor:
-
RubyParser 3:
Ruby19Parser.new.parse "->(a){foo}"
# => s(:iter, s(:call, nil, :lambda),
# s(:lasgn, :a), s(:call, nil, :foo))
-
RipperRubyParser:
RipperRubyParser::Parser.new.parse "->(a){foo}"
# => s(:iter, s(:call, nil, :lambda, s(:arglist)),
# s(:lasgn, :a), s(:call, nil, :foo, s(:arglist)))
So, what’s the conclusion? For parsing Ruby 1.9 syntax, there are really
only two options: RubyParser and RipperRubyParser. The latter stays
closer to the UnifiedRuby format, but the difference is small.
RubyParser’s results are a little neater, so RipperRubyParser should
probably conform to the same format. Reek can then be updated to use the
cleaner format, and use either library for parsing.
Tags
ripper, ruby, sexp, software
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Posted by matijs
17/04/2012 at 07h41
This morning, I found myself looking for a simple markdown previewer that would run on the desktop. Using GirFFI, it was ridiculously easy to create it myself.
The simple version, based on the Webkit example in the GirFFI repository, goes something like this:
require 'ffi-gtk3'
require 'github/markup'
GirFFI.setup :WebKit, ’3.0’
Gtk.init
win = Gtk::Window.new :toplevel
scr = Gtk::ScrolledWindow.new nil, nil
wv = WebKit::WebView.new
win.add scr
scr.add wv
win.set_default_geometry 700, 500
win.show_all
file = ARGV[0]
fullpath = File.expand_path(file, Dir.pwd)
html = GitHub::Markup.render fullpath
wv.load_string html, nil, nil, "file://#{fullpath}"
GObject.signal_connect(win, "destroy") { Gtk.main_quit }
Gtk.main
I got the basic version working in about 10 minutes. The more complex version adds a keyboard handler to allow reloading the viewed file.
Tags
GirFFI, software
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Posted by matijs
11/12/2011 at 18h08
Something weird just happened. While refactoring GirFFI, I had managed to remove all use of a particular module. So, I removed the corresponding file, ran the tests using
rake test
And the tests passed. Committed, done.
Then, I took a walk down to the library. By the time I got back, as soon as I looked at my code again, there it was: A giant require statement requiring the file I had just removed. Huh, why do my tests pass?
Well, duh, I have GirFFI installed as a gem, and my code is just picking up the missing file from there. So, I run
bundle exec rake test
The tests fail, showing me exactly the line I need to remove. Commit amended, done.
So, the moral of the story: If you’re developing a gem, use your isolation tool of choice, be it Bundler, Isolate, or something else, to shield your gem development environment from older installed versions.
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software
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Posted by matijs
31/07/2011 at 17h31
Recently, there was a change in where Debian’s rubygems packages store each gem’s files. Instead of having a separate bin directory for each version of ruby, now both the 1.8 and the 1.9 version store scripts in /usr/local/bin. In fact, they will happily overwrite each other’s scripts. This can be very confusing when you think you’re running a script with Ruby 1.8, but in fact it’s running with 1.9, and hence, 1.9’s set of installed gems.
All this made me seriously consider using RVM. Which was quite shocking, as I consider it to be an ugly hack, both in concept and in execution. So, rather than admitting defeat, I decided to create my own hack.
Tags
software
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Posted by matijs
10/05/2011 at 07h09
Over two years ago, I had the idea, that it should be possible to combine two great technologies, ruby-ffi, and GObject Introspection, to dynamically create bindings for GLib-based libraries.
This idea, like many, was born from frustration: The development of
Ruby-GNOME2 is labour-intensive, and therefore, it lags behind the
development of Gnome libraries. In particular, I wanted to use the Gio
library, which had no bindings at the time, to fetch generated icons for
images.
Tags
software
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