Ruby 3.4 - almost!

#​730 — December 12, 2024

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Ruby 3.4.0 Release Candidate 1 Released— Christmas is almost here, and that means the imminent release of Ruby 3.4. If you haven’t played with it yet, 3.4.0-rc1 is worth trying as it includes everything the final release will, including the switch over to the Prism parser (so certainly worth testing). We’ll do a full 3.4 rundown once it’s released, but this is a good early Xmas present for now.

Yui Naruse

Lightstorm: A Minimalistic Ruby Compiler— It’s not every week we get to hear of a new Ruby implementation or compiler, especially not on the official LLVM blog. Lightstorm (source here) comes from the same folks as DragonRuby and is largely motivated by potential performance gains.

Alex Denisov and Amir Rajan

💤 Make Rails Upgrades Budget-Friendly & Boringly Reliable— Stuck on Rails 5.2? FastRuby.io’s monthly maintenance keeps costs low and complexity minimal. Top engineering teams rely on Bonsai for gradual, 0-downtime upgrades—making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

Bonsai by FastRuby.io sponsor

Keeping Rails Cool: The Modern Frontend Toolkit— If you’re like me, building backend apps is the fun part and the frontend.. not so much. With numerous approaches to building frontends for Rails apps, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, but Irina explains four tools/approaches to keep things simple.

Irina Nazarova

IN BRIEF:

• Ruby Central and Trail of Bits have completed the first security audit of RubyGems.org and identified 33 issues that they're now working to resolve.

• 🇨🇭 Helvetic Ruby 2025 takes place in Switzerland next May and is looking for speakers with a CFP open till January 29.

• Tim Riley marks a new chapter for the dry-rb and Ruby Object Mapper (ROM) projects as long-term lead developer, Peter Solnica, is retiring from them. Luckily, there's a full team to keep them progressing, and a plan to merge them into the Hanami framework.

• aws-sdk-rails user? you need to be aware of significant refactoring/modularization changes in both aws-sdk-rails 4.2 and 5.0.

10 Tips from 10 Years of Hotwire Native— Admittedly, Hotwire Native only launched a few months ago, but Joe has been working with its underlying ancestor technologies for a long time.

Joe Masilotti

Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer— If even looking at Python is sacrilege to you, skip this one, but Andrew does a reasonable job of comparing two rather different ecosystems, but one you may be asked to look at with Python's current lingua franca status.

Andrew Atkinson

Turbo Morphing Woes— We all know inventing the ship also invented the shipwreck. Morphing has some excellent applications but also comes with a new set of gotchas.

Matheus Richard (Thoughtbot)

Product for Engineers: A Newsletter Helping Flex Your Product Muscle— Get curated advice on building great products, lessons from building PostHog, and the strategies of top startups.

PostHog sponsor

📄 I Like Makefiles– I do this too to help me organize/remember the various shell incarnations I need for each project I’m working on. Sebastian Witowski

📄 Mastering Ruby Debugging: From puts to Professional ToolsDmitry Pogrebnoy (JetBrains)

📄 How to Use a Remote Build Server with KamalJosef Strzibny

📄 How Does Kamal Deploy to Multiple Hosts?Josef Strzibny

📄 From Jekyll to Astro: An AI-Assisted MigrationKevin London

🛠 Code & Tools

Nokogiri v1.17.0: The Long Standing XML and HTML Library— As a mature library, Nokogiri doesn’t see many big updates, and while this is a stability/bugfix release, it’s a substantial one with improvements to the SAX parsers, fragment parsing, error handling, and schema validation. Keyword arguments have also been added to many methods, thanks to RubyConf 2024 Hack Day participants.

Mike Dalessio et al.

Rails Icons 1.0: Add SVG Icon Libraries to Rails Apps— You can set any one of a number of popular icon libraries as the default and then use those icons (which are dynamically pulled from their home repos) easily with a quick helper. GitHub repo.

Rails Designer

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

rvm-windows 1.0: A Ruby Version Manager for Windows— Despite the name, this isn’t related to RVM but offers similar functionality for native Windows use cases (no Cygwin or WSL needed) whether at the traditional Windows command line or in PowerShell.

Matthäus J. N. Beyrle

ferrum-har: Capture Ferrum Traffic to a HAR File— Quite niche, but quite handy too if you’re using the Ferrum gem to remote control a Chrome instance and you want to log the interactions in HAR format.

Harry Lascelles

▶  Botcasts: A Do-It-Yourself Hotwire-Powered Podcast Player— This isn’t ready to run, but is the foundation for an interactive tutorial called Hotwire Essentials where you build a dynamic podcast player with the latest Rails and Hotwire features.

Thoughtbot

• Rails 7.0.8.7, 7.1.5.1, 7.2.2.1, and 8.0.0.1– A security patch release.

• Passenger 6.0.24– The popular application server now has much faster rolling restarts – explained in more depth here.

• valvat 2.0– Validate European VAT numbers. UK VAT number validation now needs an HMRC API login.

• RailsAdmin 3.3– Rails engine providing a CRUD interface to your data. (Demo.)

• StoreModel 4.2– Wrap JSON-backed DB columns with ActiveModel-like classes.

• Elasticsearch.rb 8.17– Ruby integrations for Elasticsearch.

• Literal 1.4– Runtime type-checking for Ruby. More info here.

• Solid Queue 1.1– Database-backed Active Job backend.

• sqlite3-ruby 2.4.1– Bumps up to SQLite v3.47.2.

• reCAPTCHA 5.18– Ruby helpers for reCAPTCHA.