vinyl-fs

in something powered by S3 or something powered by WebDAV, since there is no abstraction in the language. The once-well-known Node.js build tool Gulp is based very much around one of the libraries out there filling this gap, called vinyl-fs[1]. From the start of it's readme, "Vinyl is a very simple metadata object that describes a file. When you think of a file, two attributes come to mind: path and contents. These are the main attributes on a Vinyl object." By defining a file in an abstract manner, it allows for non-platform implementations, like S3, or WebDAV, or in-memory. It allows talking about files, without having to actually do unto files. It's a bit hard to connect back to the discussion on git and git executable's run-to-completion model, but this idea, of the language having it's own abstractions & being able to do computing inside the runtime without having to keep going back to the platform as the one & only source of truth, allows a lot of flexibility for manipulating the system that is otherwise often cumbersome & involves redundant back & forth work. Getting away from git's normal run-and-execute command model, & comprehending git is the sort of thing that's super useful if you're writing editors, ides, github-like systems, & gitops tools. [1] https://github.com/gulpjs/vinyl-fs

bage I don't want (see you later turbolinks) and drop in all the things I do want. It's actually just a few lines to manipulate, so I can hardly complain. In the Node world there's a lot of hand-holding required to get even the most basic application up and running. I can see this getting cut down dramatically if you had things like "npm install express +extras" where there was some way of saying "plus whatever other stuff you think is a good idea", or even an "express-fully-loaded" version of the package that comes with a bunch of stuff out of the box. I really like Gulp and when configured it gives you an amazing amount of control over your build process. Although the Rails Asset Pipeline system works as a pretty good default out-of-the-box they really should steal some ideas from Gulp on configurability for those occasions where you want to change the default behaviour. Vinyl.fs (https://github.com/gulpjs/vinyl-fs) is an amazing thing that the Ruby world desperately needs.