GraalVM

Exposing Clojure to Ruby and other languages

Recently, I’ve been missing Pathom (from Clojure) in the Ruby world. So I decided to check if I could expose an arbitrary Clojure library to Ruby, using the GraalVM’s “Substrate VM” (popularly known as native_image).

The way I tried to do this was to expose a shared library to C, then making a Ruby extension that consumes this shared library and then finally “normalize stuff” into Ruby. This… honestly, worked way better than I expected, and because I needed a lot of help from AI tools, guesswork, and reading some very weirdly-written Java code from Oracle (and auto-generated Javadocs) I decided to make a post explaining the whole process.

The whole experience started as weird, then easy, then VERY hard, and right now… I’m not sure where it will be, because I’m kind of changing the whole project’s core ideas (the reasons will be clear while you read this post). So let’s dive in
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Porting Clojure libraries to Ruby – Part 2

Last post I gave an introduction on how I’m working with GraalVM to port Clojure things to Ruby. Now, it’s time to handle the hard parts.

The first thing is – some stuff simply doesn’t work. Pathom3 (the library I wanted to port) depends on Guardrails, which requires core.async, which starts a thread pool, which GraalVM doesn’t like. At all.

And the second things is how to serialize some weird stuff like callbacks. So let’s start with the first part – how to make a “Pathom3 shared library” without GraalVM screaming at us
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Porting Clojure libraries to Ruby

Since I started working with Ruby, in some situations I miss some of the Clojure libraries – especially killer ones like Pathom.

Unfortunately, rewriting the whole library in a different language is completely out of the question, especially because I will reintroduce some of the bugs that are already fixed, and will not have some of the more important features like parallel processing and other stuff.

But it’s not an “end of the world” situation. GraalVM have a very important feature that is to compile Java code to native, using what it’s usually called the “native-image” or, to be more precise, SubtrateVM. I also knew that you could generate shared libraries with this approach, but I never actually did anything and in my last attempts – every time I tried the only result I had was lots of frustrations and weird errors.

So that’s why I’m very proud and very surprised to announce that I have a Pathom working in Ruby right now.

But more on that later – it’s probably not yet ready to be used in production; but what I want to share is how I actually made it work, then challenges I faced (and how to handle them) and how can other people do the same. Finally, I am writing this post to make it easy for other people to do the same – honestly, the whole thing was awfully hard but not because it’s actually hard – but because the documentation is lacking so much that, at some times, I even though things I did were not possible.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago