davydovanton / stop_active_support_anywhere

Stop use Active Support in not rails related projects

Stop ActiveSupport Anywhere

Goal

We love ruby and ruby community. We can find excellent web (and not only web) frameworks like rails, hanami, grape, sinatra, dry-wb, roda, etc. But sometimes some developers use rails dependency in gems which not related to use only with rails. That's why the main idea of this repo is to collect all libraries which you can use instead using ActiveSupport

Some Problems with ActiveSupport

ActiveSupport is a "toolkit of support libraries and Ruby core extensions extracted from the Rails framework". Core extensions is a prettier name for monkey-patches of Ruby core classes. Monkey-patching breaks fundamental contracts with the language core - with deadly consequences.

Monkey-patching hinders interoperability. Any piece of Ruby software is written to work either in the monkey-patch-free environment, or in the monkey-patched one. Sure: with a bit of luck, many work in both. But won't your gem break with the next release of ActiveRecord (which it itself doesn't rely on at all)? Noone can say in advance.

When it is Permissible to Depend on ActiveSupport?

"You are definitely allowed to shoot yourself in the foot, if you really want to." It is only responsible to rely on ActiveSupport (or another similar ton of monkey-patches) if you are in position of the "lord of the stack", i.e., if you are developing an application, and you are the only one who decides forever, which components will interoperate. Libraries, aiming to be general tools, maximally interoperable with others, as well as applications open to extensions, must never pollute the runtime environment by monkey-patching.

Blog Posts

• Cutting Corners or Why Rails May Kill Ruby by @solnic
• Do, or do not. There is no #try.

TODO

1. collect all gems or solutions which can replace some parts of AS (current status)
2. filter all this information
3. create list of not only rails gems which use AS and try to fix it

Table of contents

• ActiveSupport::ArrayInquirer
• ActiveSupport::BacktraceCleaner
• ActiveSupport::Callbacks
• ActiveSupport::Configurable
• ActiveSupport::Concurrency
• ActiveSupport::Deprecation
• ActiveSupport::Duration
• ActiveSupport::Gzip
• ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
• ActiveSupport::Inflector
• ActiveSupport::LazyLoadHooks
• ActiveSupport::Notifications
• ActiveSupport::NumberHelper
• ActiveSupport::NumericWithFormat
• ActiveSupport::RangeWithFormat
• ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
• ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions

Features

date formatters

• date-formatter

ActiveSupport::ArrayInquirer

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

# instead of:
[:blue, :green].blue?

# do this:
[:blue, :green].include?(:blue)

ActiveSupport::BacktraceCleaner

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. gem: Morozzzko/backtrace_cleaner link

ActiveSupport::Callbacks

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. gem: delner/hollerback link
2. gem: PragTob/after_do link
3. sources: RSpec::Core::Hooks link

ActiveSupport::Configurable

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. gem: dry-configurable link
2. gem: markevans/configurable link
3. gem: ged/configurability link
4. post: Ruby Gem Configuration Patterns link
5. post: MyGem.configure Block link

ActiveSupport::Concurrency

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. ruby-concurrency link

ActiveSupport::Deprecation

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. core library: Gem::Deprecate link
2. gem: Hanami::Deprecation link
3. gem: erikh/deprecated link
4. gem: cbeer/deprecation link

ActiveSupport::Duration

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. gem: zverok/time_math2 link
2. gem: zverok/time_calc link
3. gem: janko-m/as-duration link

ActiveSupport::Gzip

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. core library: zlib link
2. SO question: How to decompress Gzip string in ruby? link

ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. core library: OpenStruct link

ActiveSupport::Inflector

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. gem: linguistics link
2. gem: dry-inflector link

ActiveSupport::LazyLoadHooks

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

none

ActiveSupport::Notifications

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. gem: dry-monitor link
2. gem: dry-events: link

ActiveSupport::NumberHelper

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. core library: Kernel#sprintf link

ActiveSupport::NumericWithFormat

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

none

ActiveSupport::RangeWithFormat

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

none

ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone

Link to rails docs

Alternatives

1. gem: et-orbi link
2. Ruby 2.6 added timezone support to core link

ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions

Integer

Not rails specific gems which use AS as dependency

• Grape

Contribute

Contributions welcome!

stop_active_support_anywhere's Issues

only_blank gem (write by me) is a replace to ActiveSupport functionality.

https://github.com/zw963/only_blank

In fact, this almost the only part useful for daily web development, so, i extract it into a gem, and introduce C extension for String#blank? performance improve.

Goal is clearly stated, but ...

... not it's value: why should it be better to depend on Hashie rather than ActiveSupport when you need hash with indifferent access? ... It's definitely worth explaining in the README.

Automation

In order to make a campaing like this effective, it would be nice to have a few tools:

• a tool for authors of ruby gems which checks gemspec/Gemfile for both direct and indirect dependency on AS
• "AS free" badge for use on project websites (similar to "gem version", "build passing" etc.; it would also significantly help to raise awareness, if adopted by some higher-profile projects like e.g. hanami)
• website with automatically generated list of gems which depend on AS

Rename repository to more constructive name

After #9 I thinking about rename this repository.

Pros

• less aggressive and more constructive for ecosystem

Cons

• less emotions -> will hard to invite a new folks (?)

README link to PORN

"Cutting Corners or Why Rails May Kill Ruby by @solnic"
http://solnic.eu/2015/06/06/cutting-corners-or-why-rails-may-kill-ruby.html == PORN

correct link
https://solnic.codes/2015/06/06/cutting-corners-or-why-rails-may-kill-ruby/

Is this merely focused on bashing ActiveSupport?

The destructive communication is sad. There is a bigger focus on making an anti ActiveSupport campaign than adding ruby gem alternatives.

Although I agree with parts of the initial concept of this project, I can't git commit on a project named stop_active_support_anywhere. Sounds irresponsible.

Also, seeing you're an @hanami core member (Rails alternative), so you have a bigger responsability on this project. /cc @jodosha
I know @hanami since Lotus, and use hanami-utils daily, so I do appreciate and recommend it.

I'll leave 2 written contributions below.

---

1. Text like this on your README should be reviewed:

ActiveSupport is Evil

There may be better alternatives to AS depending on situations/contexts

"You are definitely allowed to shoot yourself in the foot, if you really want to."

I couldn't walk today considering the amount of times in the last 10+ years of my Ruby consultancy experience I've successfully used ActiveSupport to help designing REST API Clients, Data Parsers / Importers, Form Objects, Service Objects, etc, ...

"if you are developing an application, and you are the only one who decides forever"

What's a "only one who decides forever" role?

---

2. More alternatives to the list

• ActiveSupport::Validations
  • dry-validations
• ActiveSupport::Attributes // ActiveSupport::Types (related to the Rails 5 Attributes API)
  • dry-types
  • virtus