Making Ruby faster with more Ruby and less C

#​729 — December 5, 2024

Read on the Web

🗓️ If you missed last week's issue, don't worry, it didn't exist – we took a week off for Thanksgiving! We're now back all the way through to the Christmas break :-)
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

Ruby Weekly

Ruby Evolution: New Ruby Features Added in 2.0 → 3.3— First launched a couple of years ago covering up to Ruby 3.1, Victor’s handy resource covering the key changes to the Ruby language over the years now goes up to Ruby 3.3. A fantastic way to check your knowledge of modern Ruby features.

Victor Shepelev

Speeding Up Ruby by Rewriting C.. in Ruby?— A fascinating look at Ruby performance and how actually writing more of Ruby’s core implementation in Ruby itself can yield surprisingly large speedups thanks to how YJIT works (I seem to recall Rubinius had a similar thesis years ago). A lot of fun and a must read, IMO.

JP Camara

Log Everything, Ask Anything with Honeybadger— Paying for an APM you rarely use? Honeybadger Insights is a powerful query engine for your logs and application events. It's a bit like New Relic or DataDog but with just the good parts and a price you can afford. Check it out!

Honeybadger sponsor

▶  An Interview with Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto— Ruby’s creator Matz was interviewed at the recent Baltic Ruby event about Ruby as well as his work-life balance, hobbies, and experiences being a father. It’s not super technical, but a good interview if you want to get a more rounded view of Matz and how he’s thinking about Ruby’s future.

Baltic Ruby

IN BRIEF:

• 📕 Josef Strzibny has just released the first edition of his new book: Test Driving Rails. It focuses on a Minitest and fixtures-based approach. Prefer RSpec? Aaron Sumner has an update of Testing with RSpec out too.

• Ruby Central shares some updates on how they've been improving the infrastructure behind RubyGems.org.

• Ruby Central's November 2024 update goes into even more depth. We learn RubyGems.org is now using Propshaft, they spent almost $100k on development work in October, and Ruby Central is 🦋 now on BlueSky.

• 🇳🇱 Rails World 2025 has been announced - it'll take place next September in Amsterdam, Netherlands. No tickets or CFP yet.

• 🇷🇴 🇵🇹 Next September might be a busy month, as Friendly.rb and EuRuKo 2025 take place in Romania and Portugal respectively in the weeks following Rails World. Time for a Grand Tour of Ruby events?

Rails is Better 'Low Code' Than 'Low Code'— Radan plays out parallel story arcs for a ‘simple’ CRUD app that evolves new features and ultimately hits the low code ceiling. This thought piece provoked a rather lively Hacker News discussion.

Radan Skorić

Overriding Methods in Rails: A No-Code-Editing Approach— How to override a class or instance method without editing its source file in Rails.

Lucian Ghinda

Automate Embedding Creation and Syncing in Postgres with pgai Vectorizer— 🚀 pgai Vectorizer automates embedding creation and syncing in Postgres with one SQL command—keeps embeddings updated, no tools needed.

Timescale sponsor

What You Need to Know About SQLite— Lessons on what the SQLite database engine can and cannot do, how Rails helps you work with SQLite, and why it may, or may not, be a good choice to back your Rails 8 app.

Ross Kaffenberger

📄 Fixing gem install Errors on a M3 Mac with Ruby 2.7– One of those posts you don’t need.. till you do! Daniela Baron

📄 Working with Server-Sent Events and WebSockets in RackAyush Newatia

📄 Automating Barcode Scanner Tests with CapybaraNick Charlton and Silumesii Maboshe

📄 Calculating the Largest Known Prime in RubyJP Camara

📄 Stimulus Features You (Didn’t) KnowRails Designer

📄 Advanced Stimulus: Custom Action OptionsRails Designer

📄 Shrinking a Postgres TableJohn Nunemaker

🛠 Code & Tools

Mission Control Jobs 1.0 Released— A dashboard and set of extensions that improve the operation and monitoring of background jobs running through Active Job and Solid Queue (or Resque).

Rosa Gutiérrez (37signals)

Building a Better Ruby ORM for Time Series and Analytics— TimescaleDB is a popular extension for adding high performance time series data functions to Postgres and the Timescale team has been working on a way to bring its enhanced time series features into Active Record.

Jônatas Davi Paganini (Timescale)

Fixed Price Monthly Code Maintenance for Rails Apps— No time to do those small but critical updates and features? CodeCare will take care of necessary tweaks, bug fixes, upgrades and ongoing improvements for your app.

reinteractive / CodeCare sponsor

pg_query 6.0: Parse, Deparse and Normalize SQL Queries with Postgres' Own Parser— Uses the actual Postgres server source to parse SQL queries and return their internal Postgres parse tree. v6.0 upgrades to using the Postgres 17 parser and the new features it supports (e.g. new JSON functions).

pganalyze

Oniguruma-to-ES: Convert Patterns from the Oniguruma Regex Engine to Native JS— Oniguruma is a powerful regex engine used by Ruby, TextMate, and other projects. This could be useful if you need to share regexes between Ruby, TextMate grammars, and JavaScript, say. There’s a demo.

Steven Levithan

Awesome Nested Set: The Nested Set Pattern for ActiveRecord Models— Billed as a replacement for acts_as_nested_set and BetterNestedSet, this now supports Rails 8.

Collective Idea

• 🐆 Puma 6.5– A major update for the powerful Ruby/Rack web server built for parallelism. (You need this version if you want to use Heroku's new Router 2.0, BTW – more detail here).

• PgParty 1.9– Create and manage Postgres partitions from Active Record.

• telegram-bot-ruby 2.1– Ruby wrapper for Telegram's Bot API.

• Literal 1.3– Runtime type-checking for Ruby. More info here.

• EBNF 2.6– EBNF parser and generic parser generator.

• Timeliness 0.5– Fast, extensible date/time parsing.

• Sequel 5.87– Popular database toolkit.

• json 2.9– Ruby's main JSON implementation.

• RBS 3.7– Ruby's type signature language.

• sqlite3-ruby 2.4