_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin
jgsteven wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
I wonder if cross-compiled Java to JavaScript or WASM would work here.
diegof79 wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
This part:
> What surprised me was that Java supported processing ZIP files and
XML from its standard runtime.
Makes me feel old.
Java was developed at a time when most people connected to the Internet
via dial-up.
That meant two things: the runtime is something you download once and
has to work offline, and it has to support compressed packages. JAR
files are essentially ZIP files with additional metadata stored as
files. So yes, thatâs why Java has built-in libraries for ZIP files.
The XML came with the âXML feverâ of the 2000s. Java was one of the
first languages to include XML support, and many of the XML DOM APIs
are very Java-oriented. And, of course, it was included in the standard
lib because nobody wanted extra module downloads over a slow
connection. (and because XML was evolving at that time, it also meant
that you had some issues between the SDK libs and user-provided libs)
NuclearPM wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
I just had to look through XML at work. What an ugly format!
chasd00 wrote 7 min ago:
There use to be a saying, "XML is like violence, if it's not
working just add more!".
hedgehog wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
You know that, and I know that, but for someone who started working
more recently the difference between CORBA and punch cards might be a
little blurry because they're both so far back they've never seen
either. It's like kids asking how the dinosaurs in LEGO Jurassic
world were animated, because they don't move like real toys, and
noting how much easier the 1993 live action Jurassic Park filming was
because back then they could just film real dinosaurs. Feels weird,
but makes sense from their perspective.
auvi wrote 1 hour 1 min ago:
Jurassic Park 1993 introduced UNIX to the mainstream world. Movies
of that era showed SGI Sun, Cray or CM computers. All gone. I miss
those days.
clan wrote 43 min ago:
Too many secrets, indeed!
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
I'm a bit surprised that Go and Rust weren't at least considered. I'd
probably have looked into Deno in addition to Bun for the combined
TS/JS assembly.
On the JS/TS side, you also have a few interesting tools to make
interacting with XML a bit easier in practice (cheerio, for example).
I'm not sure if the purpose in interacting with DOCX and to what extent
manipulation is wanted/needed... it's a complex format to say the
least, especially with references/embedding.
I've never been a Java fan, having preferred C# along the way, but I
don't think I'd use either for something like this just because of the
runtime size, if nothing else.
Bengalilol wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
I think this project could be a perfect (I may be biased and didn't
dig) candidate for Haxe to JS dev : no framework (except a small node
server?), strict typing, minimal dependencies (jszip and maybe
fast-xml-parser). What could go wrong?
exabrial wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
Reality has types and identity. Static types just make sense.
That all being said, the JVM has never broken into local apps, even
with JavaFx. I think the thought of installing a JVM, plus then
installing an app is no longer a workflow most users will tolerate.
Electron has proved though people don't mind downloading a multi-gig
app anymore however, so maybe this is no longer an issue.
leapingdog wrote 53 min ago:
I have unknowingly bought commercial desktop software that turned out
to be Java + SQLite under the hood. Don't know what they were using
for UI.
winrid wrote 2 hours 53 min ago:
jpackage/jlink lets you distribute an exe, dmg, etc, with the JVM
packaged inside. I have java desktop apps which are like 50mb.
chromanoid wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
MCPs and complex CLI tools running locally/native via graalvm
might be a great usecase for Java.
URI [1]: https://quarkus.io/blog/mcp-server/
smrtinsert wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
Bitwig and Intellij stand out to me
exabrial wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
Yeah Intellij is incredible, and I believe it's Swing. And Eclipse
is ambulatory, but the SWT/OSGI frameworks are fighting yesterday's
battles. All of this aside, I yet to find this level of
IDE/Debugger in any other language.
I'll check out Bitwig.
mring33621 wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
Maybe it's because I don't know anything about how claude plugins work,
but I find it odd that there's no actual TS code in the mentioned repo:
[1] There is a zip file of code in the releases though. I wonder if the
LPGL 3.0 license covers that?
UPDATE: the zip file is just the repo itself. So everything interesting
is in the legalrabbit-docx-mcp.exe, contained in the GitHub releases.
What a tease.
URI [1]: https://github.com/LegalRabbit-AI/legalrabbit-docx-claude-plug...
shevy-java wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
> I wrote a lot of Ruby back in 2010s. I felt Ruby was a beautiful
language. Unfortunately, I don't feel that anymore.
Perhaps because he sucks.
It's easy to write ugly code in any language. You need to think, in
order to write good code, in any language. Even then some languages are
uglier than others. All my PHP code looks awful in comparison to my
ruby code. Even with the same expertise level, the issue remains that
PHP is just an uglier language. Similar comparisons can be made for
many other languages.
> The biggest issue is no typing.
Well ... it's not. But it is pointless to try to explain this people
whose brain is too addicted to "mama told me types must go into
everything I touch".
> I worked at Stripe for 4.5 years, so I looked into integrating Sorbet
There you go! This already tainted his ability to THINK.
> Forgot .each in node.children.each do |x|. The error showed up as
"unexpected nil" at a random place.
Erm ... how can you forget this while claiming you write a lot of code
in ruby?
By the way, I almost never use the do/end synax. It helps me visually
to use {}.
A side effect is that:
def foobar(
i = node.children
)
i.each {|element|
check_for_cats_in_this_container(element)
}
end
will also be easier to visually notice missing things
such as ".each" or ".map" or anything. Keep the structure
simple at all times. And no, forgetting .each a lot - that
is a bogus complaint. People using ruby for a little while
don't really do such an error. But let's assume it is that
way:
def foobar(
i = node.children
)
i {|element|
check_for_cats_in_this_container(element)
}
end
Well, that visually already looks wrong. What method
did you want to run on the variable i here?
> Forgot .children in node.children[i]. The error showed up as
> "unexpected nil" at a random place.
Mate - use methods. The guy seems to have written only spaghetti
code in ruby. Definitely not "4.5 years of writing ruby". Nah.
Also, "unexpected nil" - first, such an error does not exist, he
probably means a nil. Second, why do you not check for nils
properly? You don't need types for that. So the issue is you were
lazy when writing the code. Understandable, but not a reason to
"I need types" as compensation for your own laziness here.
> Using assert_raises in the test obscured a compilation error.
What compilation actually? Then again someone who forgets .each,
already disqualified here.
>I used ruby_llm-mcp where the doc mentioned tool.input_schema but the
latest version has renamed it to tool.params_schema (issue). It took me
a while to figure out since there was no typing hint to help me with
it.
Sounds like a project with awful documentation. This is a problem with
many ruby projects. For some reason ruby projects hate documentation,
with a few exceptions. I never understood this. To me it seems writing
ruby is fun, then nobody wants to write documentation. That's really
stupid of those people who do. Please look at rack. This thing has no
real documentation that is useful. Same with opal and ruby-wasm. Ruby
hates documentation. It's my number #1 complaint too.
I am fine with those admitting to this problem. Who I can not stand are
the "the code is self-explanatory". This always leads me to assume the
code is utter garbage. And this indeed is almost always the case so.
> rubyzip: it has an obscure bug where it produced a corrupted DOCX
file. I've encountered this bug with a DOCX file from our customers. I
can't share the confidential file to the rubyzip author.
Or it is a fake story. Is this AI generated text? The guy makes up
things on the
fly.
People, please - stop using AI. It will slop zombify your brain.
wiseowise wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
How do you manage to write completely sane messages in some threads
and then come up with the most unhinged shit like this?
mark_l_watson wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
Sometimes I see things that make me reevaluate assumptions I make. I am
all in on flexibility using LLMs and agentic coding harnesses: I hate
feeling locked down to one platform.
Then I saw this in the article:
>> I've discovered that Claude Desktop supports MCPB. The MCPB provides
a Node runtime. Therefore, our application would only contain our code.
This means the size of the application would be ~1MB.
I don't know why this is so appealing to me but it is. I currently use
Claude Code with a DeepSeek v4 Pro API backend. I will check out if
Claude Code itself has MCPB support.
jondwillis wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
> I will check out if Claude Code itself has MCPB support.
It doesnât.
martinald wrote 6 hours 7 min ago:
How is it surprising to people that zip and XML are in stdlibs for a
programming language?
Btw, you should have looked at dotnet for this as well. There is a very
good library ( DocumentFormat.OpenXml) that can handle all
docx/xlsx/pptx files. And dotnet can ship standalone binaries (though
AOT probably won't work).
rjrjrjrj wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
Difficult to square the author's surprise with the later comment "I
have my fair share of building a Java desktop application and know
jpackage and alike very well"
You can't get very far in Java development without working with .jar
files (which are zip archives).
CharlieDigital wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
[1] First party from Microsoft; feels like it would be the way to
go.
URI [1]: https://github.com/dotnet/Open-XML-SDK
xnorswap wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
That is the source of DocumentFormat.OpenXml, you're talking about
the same package, [1] Microsoft are incapable of:
1. naming things well
2. keeping those names stable
URI [1]: https://github.com/dotnet/Open-XML-SDK#packages
pier25 wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
Many runtimes/languages rely on third party deps for that. Also
plenty of devs think the stdlib should be as lean as possible.
Personally, I think there should be a balance. The direct consequence
of a barebones stdlib is NPM and having to download hundreds of
dependencies for a hello world.
wky wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
Golang has the golang.org/x packages, which avoids too much stdlib
bloat while still providing the niceties of âpre-vettedâ
packages that donât pull in a massive dependency tree.
pier25 wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
yeah I wish Node had something like that
slopinthebag wrote 22 min ago:
It does! (well Deno does but you can use them in Node)
URI [1]: https://jsr.io/@std
flossly wrote 6 hours 25 min ago:
Nice to see Ruby vs Java. Must say that in this context Kotlin deserves
a mention: my Kotlin code basically looks+feels like Ruby-with-types.
Both Ruby and Kotlin are essentially OO, but with "lots of FP features
where it makes sense".
On the side of the jpackage: I'm currently using GraalVM compile to
native for a Kotlin CLI tool. I do the build in a build container so I
use an older glib to ensure compatibility on a wide variety of Linuxes,
AND because this way no-one needs to install all the GraalVM
requirements by hand. The result is a 57MB binary, that start in a
blink of the eye. The downside is long compile times (2 minutes for a
simple CLI tool that uses AWS SDK). I think I prefer this of jpackage;
but I'm not building a GUI tool.
pjmlp wrote 4 hours 52 min ago:
Many of those "lots of FP features where it makes sense". were
already present in Smalltalk.
Especially anything related to lambdas, map, filter and co.
Something that was lost in most OOP languages that followed suit,
until like a decade later.
flossly wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
> Many of those "lots of FP features where it makes sense". were
already present in Smalltalk.
Good point. And both Java and Ruby borrowed from Smalltalk
(according to Wikipedia Kotlin does not, but that is: not directly.
Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess they
were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard), and we needed streams
and now Kotlin to fix that :)
Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say
that was its biggest drawback.
leapingdog wrote 1 hour 2 min ago:
> Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess
they were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard)
You guess correctly. Java was easy for C++ developers to learn
which was beneficial for adoption at the time.
giobox wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
> Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could
say that was its biggest drawback.
A lot of Smalltalk-style syntax was absolutely massive for a
decade or so you could argue, at least under the guise of the
gazillions of iPhone apps that were written in Objective-C. This
random blog post probably does a better job than me:
>
URI [1]: https://richardeng.medium.com/apple-has-been-using-small...
lukan wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
"Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say
that was its biggest drawback."
This would be my guess, I always heard nice things about it and
liked many concepts, but the syntax was just plain ugly to me, so
I never felt the urge to try it out. I imagine others felt
similar.
mike_hearn wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
There's Apache POI which is intended for working with Office documents,
so directly using XML parsers might not be necessary.
The MCPB format seems to be able to run external processes, even if
there's a Node in the middle. So you could also compile the Java
version to a native binary with GraalVM and ship that as an MCPB.
vintagedave wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
> MCPB
It's annoying when acronyms are used without explanation. It's [1] ,
which looks a kind of installation bundle for MCP servers.
URI [1]: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/mcpb
srcreigh wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
Some more info from the link:
> MCP Bundles (.mcpb) are zip archives containing a local MCP server
and a manifest.json that describes the server and its capabilities.
The format is spiritually similar to Chrome extensions (.crx) or VS
Code extensions (.vsix), enabling end users to install local MCP
servers with a single click.
wiseowise wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
Just scroll down a little bit. They link what MCPB is.
> Later, I've discovered that Claude Desktop supports MCPB.
DIR <- back to front page