Installing the sassc Ruby gem on a Mac. A debugging story

15 points by schneems

jamesgecko

I understand that the point of the post is about debugging gem compilation. But if the goal is to use Sass, the sass-embedded gem is the best option for most people. The main Sass implementation is written in Dart now, and that implementation is generally going to be easier to install on most machines.

schneems

Thanks! I didn’t know about that gem and that could be useful down the road.

But if the goal is to use Sass

Interestingly enough, it’s not. Or rather, not directly. I (and many others) need to install this gem so we can build dependencies on older projects that have it as a transitive dependency, usually sass-rails which is mostly a plugin to sprockets for generating assets. I don’t need to do anything with sass or assets, I just need to be able to “bundle install” successfully. That context is important when looking at replacements.

So: Replacing the sassc gem is the wrong zoom level, you would need to build a replacement that works with legacy rails + sprockets. And since Dave has moved away from sprockets, its going to be an uphill maintenance battle with little (community) return on investment.

I appreciate the info about a dart based sass library. If it has an identical API there’s a (slim) chance it could just work ™️. But you would still need to fork the top level gem that has it as a requirement.