native-image

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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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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