virtus

> I just figure, everything is coming in as a string no matter what. It's going back out as a string. Maybe so, but that only accurately describes things at the boundaries of your system. Your database tables still have columns that hold integers, dates, or floats. Sure, you could do the type coercions as needed, but at that point you're missing out on the valuable opportunity to validate your data as it enters the system. You can provide meaningful errors to users as early as possible, you can avoid defensive checks nearly everywhere else within your code, and you can just generally trust that invariants about your data are going to hold throughout the rest of your program. This leads to smaller test suites, more concise codebases, and higher security assurances overall. If you look at the sorts of vulnerabilities that often pop up in Ra

Cool looks like virtus: https://github.com/solnic/virtus, have you looked at how virtus, axiom: https://github.com/dkubb/axiom and the query optimizer are implemented?

As someone who has written both Perl and Ruby (in that order), you might be interested in this Ruby gem to alleviate at least some of those problems: https://github.com/solnic/virtus