New Year, New Ruby

#​684 — January 4, 2024

Read on the Web

We're back! What a fantastic end to the year Ruby had. We're going to cover as much of it as we can today, so be prepared, there's a lot.. :-)
__
Peter and the Cooperpress team

Ruby Weekly

🎉  Ruby 3.3 Released— It's not exactly breaking news, but I was too busy eating turkey on Christmas Day to dig into this new, mammoth release of Ruby till now 😉 If you’ve been playing with the preview and RC releases, little has changed, but here’s the big picture regarding improvements:

• A leap in IRB's capabilities, notably around debugging and autocompletion.
• The inclusion of the Prism parser as a default gem, opening up a standard, approved way to work with the Ruby AST in any Ruby project.
• YJIT is faster and more efficient than before.
• Inclusion of a new pure Ruby RJIT JIT compiler, mostly for experimentation.
• Inclusion of the M:N thread scheduler.
• For more, Chris Oliver ▶️ has a 17-minute screencast, or check out the next item to dig deep.

Yui Naruse

Ruby 3.3's Language Changes in Detail— For five years, Victor has scoured through each new Ruby release and produced extensive notes on the changes made to the language (rather than CRuby the implementation). 3.3 gets the same treatment here, and any time you spend checking this out will be repaid in problems avoided during future upgrades.

Victor Shepelev

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Get CodeCare Shield for Ruby on Rails Security & Updates— Worried about your Ruby on Rails application? With CodeCare Shield, your app will always be secure and up-to-date. Don't let vulnerabilities in your Ruby on Rails applications keep you up at night – let us handle your security worries.

reinteractive/CodeCareShield sponsor

• ▶️ The talks from Blue Ridge Ruby 2023 are now on YouTube, covering topics from types and machine learning to RSpec's bad parts and the Coverage module.

• 🗣 An interview with Elia Schito of the Opal Ruby-to-JavaScript transpiler project.

• 🕹 The developer of the DragonRuby Game Toolkit shares an end of year review of how the project has grown in 2023 and why it is, they believe, "the best engine for indie devs who want to build commercial 2D games."

• 👾 In other Ruby gamedev news, Bloopy & Droopy is a forthcoming Nintendo Switch game built atop mruby and SFML. It's not by the same author, but the RubyConf talk ▶️ Building a Commercial Game Engine using mRuby and SDL has more info on related tech.

• 🤔 If you're not yet overwhelmed, why not think about what might be in Rails 8? One thing not mentioned is Brakeman will be added to Rails 8 apps by default.

• 🥳 Amanda Perino reflects on the first year of the Rails Foundation.

• 💄 DHH waxes lyrical about the role of 'style' in Ruby code, and also finally says goodbye to UJS.

📕 Articles & Tutorials

Why You Need Strong Parameters in Rails— Strong Parameters were introduced in Rails in response to a rash of ‘mass assignment’ vulnerabilities. This post explains the problem and how it is addressed in modern Rails apps.

Akshay Khot

Inheritance in Ruby, in Pictures— Unsurprisingly, an illustrated guide to how inheritance works.

Jake Zimmerman

Free eBook: Advanced Database Programming with Rails and Postgres— Learn about subqueries, materialized views, and custom data types in Postgres & Rails and follow along with our examples.

pganalyze sponsor

Nested Modules in Ruby— An explanation of not just two ways to define them, but how to access nested constants and what Module.nesting does.

Akshay Khot

Turn Your Code Into Pixel Art— You might think your code is a work of art, but now it can be visually true, too.

Matheus Richard

Editing Rails Credentials using VS Code— How to use VS Code to edit secrets when you run rails credentials:edit.

Harrison Broadbent

▶  Demystifying the Ruby Package Ecosystem— A RubyConf 2023 talk.
Jenny Shen

Rust, Ruby, and the Art of Implicit Returns
Adam Gordon Bell

Eight Turbo 8 'Gotchas'
Brad Gessler

🛠 Code & Tools

Introducing Superglue: React ❤️ Rails— An attempt at a framework that brings together Rails, React and Redux in a way that makes them as smooth and productive to use as Hotwire, Turbo and Stimulus. We’ll never say no to more options in this area.

thoughtbot

Extralite 2.4: An Enhanced Way to Work with SQLite from Ruby— Imagine a faster and easier way to use SQLite from Ruby than the default sqlite3 library. Now, stop imagining and try this. v2.4 includes improvements like improved performance for multi-threaded apps and support for binding BLOBs.

Sharon Rosner

All that said, sqlite3-ruby 1.7 has just landed with full Ruby 3.3 support.

Dragonfly — Redis with Wings, Built for Modern Ruby Applications— A drop-in Redis replacement with better performance and scalability. Apps built on Dragonfly deliver faster experiences while reducing costs.

Dragonfly sponsor

Versionaire 13.0: An Immutable Semantic Version Type— If you’re working with version numbers, this class provides a lot of neat abstractions (for comparisons, type conversions, equality, etc.)

Brooke Kuhlmann

• Sinatra 3.2– The popular DSL-based webapp library. Has a few small enhancements, but most critically Ruby 3.3 and Bundler 2.5 compatibility.

• ActiveType 2.4– Make any Ruby object 'quack like ActiveRecord.'

• RubyGems 3.5.4– gem update --system now respects Ruby version constraints.

• Business Class 1.3– Commercial Rails SaaS kit. Now with (initial) Stripe support.

• Graphs and Charts 0.2– Chart controls for Glimmer DSL for LibUI.

• HairTrigger 1.1– Manage database triggers in a Rails-y way.

• SmarterCSV 1.10– Load CSVs in as arrays of hashes.

• Async 2.8– Asynchronous event-driven reactor.

• parallel_tests 4.4– More cores == faster tests.

• Reek 6.2– 'Code smell' detector for Ruby.