Initial batch of swapping Active Support extensions for in-house alternatives (WIP)

[jaredcwhite]

Congruent with our stated goals for Bridgetown 2.0 here: https://www.bridgetownrb.com/future/road-to-bridgetown-2.0-escaping-burnout/

This PR offers an initial batch of in-house Ruby extensions in lieu of using Active Support dependencies. It also sets up a paradigm of using Zeitwerk and modules to manage core object inclusions. Update: see below for thoughts about mostly relying on refinements vs. standard monkey-patches.

• .questionable lets us continue using the nicety of Bridgetown.env.development?
• .starts_with? and ends_with? as alias of start_with? and end_with?
• .within? as a souped-up version of in? — companions of Module/Classes, Sets, and Hashes are nicer because they use the < operator. Makes sense that {easy_as: 123} would be .within?({indeed: "it's true", easy_as: 123}). Arrays/Arrays use .difference under the hood, so that [1,2] would be within [5,4,3,2,1]
• .nested_within? lets you see if Foo::Bar is nested within Foo, and you can also access nested parent modules/classes with .nested_parents
• Also added: translation safety
• A simplistic deep_dup for Hashes/Arrays
• hash_with_dot_access has been rewritten entirely to remove AS dependency, and is now faster due to defining accessor methods on first method_missing calls.
• Update: moved the base Model class (aka the raw data underlying a Resource) completely away from Active Model. Callbacks removed too. A lot of concepts just never gelled anyway (like adding validation to individual model classes?!) and were intended for a CMS-like use case I'm moving away from anyway (a future "Bridgetown CMS" would likely be headless where the UI and the data models live in separate services).
• Callbacks for Builders has been refactored, and it's a bit simpler. I'm not entirely sure we even need them upon reflection, but it seems potentially useful for extending gem-based builders…
• Update: We're now using a subclass of Dry::Inflector as the basis for our native Bridgetown inflection support. updated docs here

Note that not all extensions will necessarily make the cut as we go through this process, but these all feel like worthwhile endeavors to me.

Feedback welcome!

[render]

Your Render PR Server URL is https://bridgetown-beta-pr-881.onrender.com.

Follow its progress at https://dashboard.render.com/static/srv-cod3jmv79t8c739bpeo0.

[render]

Your Render PR Server URL is https://bridgetown-api-pr-881.onrender.com.

Follow its progress at https://dashboard.render.com/static/srv-cod3jn779t8c739bpeu0.

[ayushn21]

Is it worth separating our extensions from bridgetown-core into another gem still contained within our monorepo?

[jaredcwhite]

@ayushn21 Ooo, I love that idea! I can immediately think of a few other existing core utilities we could extract out as well. Could then be a nice little standalone gem.

Any ideas on what to call it?

[ayushn21]

It's not the most creative name, but maybe bridgetown-ruby? That signifies we're creating a dialect under the Ruby stdlib for use within Bridgetown.

[jaredcwhite]

@ayushn21 Ah, hmm well that would keep the scope pretty small (and not appropriate for the utilities I was thinking about). Let me chew on that…

[jaredcwhite]

@ayushn21 what do you think about bridgetown-lib?

[brandondrew]

bridgetown-support?
bridgetown-extensions?

[ayushn21]

bridgetown-foundation?

[brandondrew]

abutment?

(An abutment is the part of a bridge that provides the support necessary to distribute the weight and stresses from the bridge to the ground, and typically anchors the bridge at either end.)

[jaredcwhite]

abutment?

@brandondrew I like the direction you're headed in…too bad that word immediately gets me thinking about juvenile humor… 😏😂

[brandondrew]

@brandondrew I like the direction you're headed in…too bad that word immediately gets me thinking about juvenile humor… 😏😂

yeah, I should have thought of that...

[pablojimeno]

What about Bridgetown Bridge? I think the repetition sounds great, but also the concept and the meta reference are interesting.

[brandondrew]

bridgetown-pillar or bridgetown-pillars

[jaredcwhite]

@brandondrew Or could go with bridgetown-piers — I did like 15 seconds of research and it seems the columns that hold up a bridge above water are called piers. 🤷🏻‍♂️

[ayushn21]

bridgetown-piers reminds of that loathsome human Piers Morgan 😂.

I'm quite partial to bridgetown-foundation because I came up with it (obviously).

But it's also a nice parallel to the iOS/Mac platform. There you have the base language (Swift or Obj-C) and then a framework called "Foundation" which sits on top of that containing a bunch of Apple system APIs. On top of that you have the framework for the platform you're developing on (UIKit, AppKit, whatever else...).

[jaredcwhite]

@ayushn21 Let's go with that then. Sounds good to me!

[jaredcwhite]

Bit of a direction switch with the latest commit…I have been an unabashed fan of Ruby refinements for the longest time, but a while back I was sort of talked out of the idea due to the performance hit of using a refined method.

Well I'm coming back around to the idea of it being a good thing. I did some benchmarking on a String using a refined method vs a standard monkey-patched method, and standard monkey-patching was about 1.25x the performance. So the question starts to become, how often does this a refined method get called during a span of time (a build process or an HTTP request, essentially)? 1 time? 5 times? 100 times? Unless it's being called literally thousands of times (I only started to see major "real time" difference in the millions), I think we're splitting hairs. We can identify certain code paths where cumulative performance is absolutely critical (so I might back out of a few changes in that recent commit), but otherwise I think it's worth it.

"indent me!".indent(2) # NoMethodError

using Bridgetown::Refinements

"indent me!".indent(2) # "  indent me!"

is just so cool. Of course you could also just reach for individual refinements, which is as close to "imports" as you'll get in Ruby:

"indent me!".indent(2) # NoMethodError

using Bridgetown::Foundation::RefineExts::String

"indent me!".indent(2) # "  indent me!"

I'm still sussing out what we might want as core extensions globally vs. refinements. SomeClass.descendants seems like a no-brainer as a core ext—frankly it should be in Ruby proper. And starts_with? as an alias to start_with? also seems like a no-brainer. Other stuff gets murky real fast…and I'd much feel more cautious/anxious patching any Ruby core classes if I knew it was a global change which we'd have to support virtually forever and that might conflict with both third-party gems and future Rubies themselves. (Hence the very real downsides of an ActiveSupport in the first place!)

Thoughts? Questions? Ideas?

[jaredcwhite]

OK, this PR is fairly well baked at this point…I'll leave it open for a while for anything else which feels like low-hanging fruit, but generally it seems in good shape to pull into the v2.0 release.

[jclusso]

I checked this out to see if it broke anything. Trying to run a build for us results in the following error. I looked through this PR, but wasn't able to hunt down what cause this. I'm not sure if this is something with Bridgetown::Component or something we're using in ActiveSupport that was removed.

[Bridgetown] Stopping auxiliary processes...                                                                        
[Bridgetown]   Exception raised: NameError                                                                          
[Bridgetown] uninitialized constant ActionView::OutputBuffer                           
[Bridgetown]                  1: /Users/jarrett/.rbenv/versions/3.2.2/lib/ruby/gems/3.2.0/gems/actionview-7.1.3.2/lib/action_view/helpers/capture_helper.rb:49:in `capture'                                                             
[Bridgetown]                  2: /Users/jarrett/.rbenv/versions/3.2.2/lib/ruby/gems/3.2.0/bundler/gems/bridgetown-e172990a669c/bridgetown-core/lib/bridgetown-core/component.rb:167:in `render' 

[jaredcwhite]

@jclusso Hmm…well Action View was never something we pulled into core, but that gets me wondering if you are also using ViewComponent?

[jclusso]

@jclusso Hmm…well Action View was never something we pulled into core, but that gets me wondering if you are also using ViewComponent?

We're just using Bridgetown::Component. We do pull in ActionView.

class SiteComponent < Bridgetown::Component
  include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
end

[jclusso]

If I follow the stack trace above it leads me to:

bridgetown/bridgetown-core/lib/bridgetown-core/converters/erb_templates.rb

Line 66 in 24b39fa

@_erbout = OutputBuffer.new

which inherits from ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer.

bridgetown/bridgetown-core/lib/bridgetown-core/converters/erb_templates.rb

Line 6 in 24b39fa

class OutputBuffer < ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer

I'm not sure how any of this works really.

[jclusso]

If I follow the stack trace above it leads me to:

bridgetown/bridgetown-core/lib/bridgetown-core/converters/erb_templates.rb

Line 66 in 24b39fa

@_erbout = OutputBuffer.new

which inherits from ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer.

bridgetown/bridgetown-core/lib/bridgetown-core/converters/erb_templates.rb

Line 6 in 24b39fa

class OutputBuffer < ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer

I'm not sure how any of this works really.

Were you ever able to hunt anything down related to why this breaks?

[jaredcwhite]

@jclusso I don't have a clear idea, but I'm wondering if you'd need to add a require for action_view/buffers — it sounds like the ActionView::OutputBuffer class isn't getting loaded.

[jaredcwhite]

Going to add a separate issue for some documentation on this, but otherwise…LGTM!

[jclusso]

@jclusso I don't have a clear idea, but I'm wondering if you'd need to add a require for action_view/buffers — it sounds like the ActionView::OutputBuffer class isn't getting loaded.

I can confirm this fixes it. Not sure where this should go, but documentation should be added for people upgrading to know if they rely on Active Support that they need to add them gem and require it.

I currently have required active_support/all and action_view/buffers in the site_builder.rb, but not sure if that's the best place?

[jaredcwhite]

@jclusso OK fabulous. I'll make a note to include this in an upgrade guide.

[jaredcwhite]

site_builder.rb is fine, but ideally I'd say it should go in config/initializers.rb.