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Misc #13787

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The path to Ruby 3.x - would it be useful to have a separate thread here at the tracker, for discussions and issues and ideas related to ruby 3.x?

Added by shevegen (Robert A. Heiler) over 6 years ago. Updated over 6 years ago.

Status:
Open
Assignee:
-
[ruby-core:82269]

Description

Hello everyone but especially so the whole ruby-core team,

This is very long, so if you just want the short gist, please
jump to the:

TL;DR line closer to the bottom.

Matz gave several presentations in the last ~3 years or so (and of course
before that as well; but I am mostly focusing only on the 3 recent years,
in particular because due to the path towards ruby 3.x).

I lately watched the presentation matz gave in Singapore and he made
some references to things that will, quite likely, go into ruby 3.x,
while he also said that there is a ton of work ahead - JIT compile
strategies; the (optional, I guess) type system; better concurrency
and so on and so forth. These are probably the big ideas - while this
is nice, and I agree with comments such as "nobody minds if ruby gets
faster" (everyone loves when things get done instantly rather than
when you must wait), I myself am actually even more interested in
smaller things. Even when they are incompatible with ruby 2.x, but
I think that matz said that backwards-compatibility breaking changes
may happen in ruby 3.x but not in ruby 2.x. Which is both good
and bad - good because people do not have to rewrite stuff to
run in ruby 2.x; bad if there are some habits or anything that
isn't that great when writing software in ruby.

Sorry for my lengthy introduction so far - I wanted to explain the
angle I am coming from here.

Now ...

I have wanted to make some smaller changes and suggestions towards
ruby 3.x. And matz once said that the core team (and, well, matz,
since he is the boss :D ) is open to ideas. In ruby 2.x, often the
core team asks for use cases, which is fine - some proposals have
not been thought through and others are purely theoretical; whereas
others are also originating from some real use case. For ruby 3.x,
it is obviously ... difficult to get a real use case out. :)

But one can actually try to make the argument about this or that
in ruby 2.x not working very well, or being confusing.

For example, some days ago, I wanted to suggest a simplified
API and usage for running external programs in ruby. We have
system(), backticks, IO, popen, open3 ... and I do not know
what else. All of which works slightly differently and it is,
at the least to me, quite confusing sometimes. So I wanted
to suggest a simplification... but I realized that this is
not really a good topic for the ruby 2.x branch because I think
that matz wants to retain compatibility, so such a proposal
probably has not a big chance to be implemented. Perhaps for
some minor changes, but I'd actually also suggest to get rid
of some of the duplicate ways, while retaining flexibility
still (so I'd say... system and backticks remain, and then
perhaps only one or two more ways for more advanced use
cases, via a simpler API than this strange ... open2 open3
and what not...).

Anyway.

If you think this through then it probably does not fit much
into "Features" for ruby 2.x because ruby 2.x will remain
backwards compatible, I think.

But for ruby 3.x, it may it.

There are many more smaller ideas like this... for example, I'd
like to see the warning/error situation be improved in ruby
3.x in particular.

I'd also like case/when objects to become full objects and be
passable/convertable ad-hoc into a hash or hash-like object,
and re-used in different .rb files. (The workarounds I know
about are usually to use a hash, with these aliases, but I
found case/when menu to be so much more readable and nicer
to use, especially as you can also use regexes).

And many more ideas like that!

But they all do not really fit into the "Bug" section, neither into
the "Feature" subsection... they may fit somewhat into "Misc" but
it's not a good category.

So, without any further explanation and further ado, here is the
summary and proposal:

TL;DR - Would it be useful to have a separate thread here at the
issue tracker, for discussions and issues and ideas related to
ruby 3.x?

This can be kept primarily as an ideas section for the time being;
at a later time, when ruby 3.x becomes the official ruby one day,
the subsection can be closed and archived for, say, 3 years or so
as read-only, before it would then be deleted (when ruby 3.x
is eventually used more frequently than ruby 2.x, which I guess
may take a few years ... there is a LOT of inertia in general,
we can see this in perl, python etc..).

The reason why I think that this would be useful is because it
could potentially foster some idea discussions. Getting early
ideas in may be good, because ruby 3.x, while it is still
quite far away I think (2020 or beyond?), getting ideas in early
may help to see that they, or a variation, is considered for
inclusion. Otherwise we then may have to wait for more years
because ruby 3.x may be frozen and people would have to wait
for ruby 4.x - this is the primary reason why I'd like to see
a separate thread.

I can not say if this is useful or not to anyone else, and I
can not say if this leads to more ideas or discussion for ruby
3.x features (aside from the big ideas matz already mentioned
several times before, such as better concurrency/guilds, JIT
and speed improves in general or any optional type system -
that's already quite a lot to work on, and all this in addition
to mruby ... but I think ideas are not bad, even if it is not
possible to implement several of them due to lack of time. When
matz approves of an idea, who knows, perhaps someone else may
see that the approved idea will be worked on).

Sorry for this lengthy note - feel free to close this at
any moment in time, for any reason!

Updated by naruse (Yui NARUSE) over 6 years ago

Just use this Redmine project.

The most important feature of bug tracker is people can check info at only one place.
Distribute information multiple places is bad idea.

Moreover whether a feature is 2.x or 3.x is decided by Matz, not reporters.

But they all do not really fit into the "Bug" section, neither into
the "Feature" subsection... they may fit somewhat into "Misc" but
it's not a good category.

In practice the difference between "Bug" and "Feature" is decided by whether it may need backport or not.
The point reflects whether the issue has backport field or not.

Therefore tickets which reporters may consider it as 3.x feature should be in Feature tracker.
(Such big change won't be backported)

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