Opalgems

[hmdne]

Ruby has now an effort to separate a lot of its stdlib to become gems - https://stdgems.org . Many of them we can run unchanged, some we will need to adapt. My proposal is as follows:

• create a GitHub opalgems organization opalgems
• create opalgems the gem to be required by default by opal (the compiler), which would mostly just bundle the standard gems and their adaptations and adjust load paths
• devise a DSL to maintain a list of available standard gems: https://github.com/opalgems/opalgems/blob/master/lib/opalgems/config.rb
• get those gems that need slight patching as forks in the opalgems organization (then - further down the line, rebase them once they get updated - and further down the line, maybe even upstream some of those patches)
• remove parts of the stdlib from opal (like Matrix for instance) and let opalgems handle them (doesn't apply to the full reimplementations)
• make opalgems the gem test all the standard gems with minitest (also applies to full reimplementations)
• opalgems to automatically release NPM packages for the NPM-based workload (use mostly seamlessly things like REXML by just doing yarn add @opalgems/rexml in an otherwise JS-only codebase?)
• while this isn't the part of the proposal, in the future consider integrating Gemfile for maintaining Opal's load paths too

What can we gain from this effort:

• The esoteric parts of Ruby's stdlib can be supported with a little effort
• We can enable a lot more mspec tests (can we say at some point that Opal passes 95% of MRI's tests? :O but mostly - this gives us much more coverage for free)
• A road ahead towards Opal becoming a viable alternative to MRI
• Easier maintenance for vendored parts of stdlib
• Progressively getting closer to Ruby in terms of compatibility