A fresh way to package Ruby apps as binaries

#​740 — February 27, 2025

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Sorbet Adds Support for RBS Comments— Long before RBS was a thing, Sorbet brought type checking to Ruby and it now has (experimental) support for using RBS comments for adding types to methods. This is a neat synergy given that most Ruby type checkers for Ruby are converging towards RBS for type annotations.

Sorbet

Compiling Ruby Apps to Binaries with Tebako— A look into Tebako, a tool (written in Ruby itself) for packaging and distributing apps written in numerous languages into binaries that can be distributed for Windows, macOS and Linux users. It does this by essentially turning an app into a self-executing container. GitHub repo.

Terminalwire

Tech Debt Dragging You Down? A Case Study About Bonsai— Too many security CVEs in production? Is your Rails app lagging due to tech debt? See how Bonsai transformed Valid Eval with 2–5× performance gains, smoother upgrades, and enhanced security. Read the case study and reclaim your time. 🚀

Bonsai by FastRuby.io sponsor

How to Submit a Better RailsConf Talk Proposal— The CFP for RailsConf 2025 closes tomorrow so if you’d like to speak, now’s the time to submit your proposal, and following the tips in this post could increase your chances.

Ruby Central

🗓️ Don't forget RubyConferences.org if you want to keep an eye out for other events to attend or submit talks to.

Dealing with (Hypothetical) Sham Packages— A fictional-but-based-on-experience account of how a malicious version update for a package/gem can easily make it into your codebase. Do you check every version bump from every dependency? This account might make you think a bit differently about blindly accepting minor version upgrades.

Samuel Giddins (RubyGems Project)

Building an Inertia App with Rails— Get the benefits of a React-based SPA approach on the frontend while keeping Rails in the backend.

Exequiel Rozas

Why Ruby on Rails Still Matters— You’re reading a Ruby newsletter, so you probably don’t need to be convinced of Rails’ relevance. This post doesn’t say a lot but did lead to a rather extensive Hacker News discussion.

Philip I. Thomas

So About Those “Noisy Neighbors”… 😬— Discovering some unfortunate realities of shared hardware (standard dynos??) and how they impact your app (also, tigers?).

Judoscale sponsor

📄 How to Remember to Review Monkey Patches When Updating Gems– They’re easily overlooked. Lucian Ghinda

📺 Rails 8 Unpacked: Inside the Default Dockerfile– A 10-minute explainer. typecraft

📄 Deciding Between Heroku AlternativesJeff Morhous

🛠 Code & Tools

Rails::Diff: Compare Rails-Generated Files with the Ones in Your App— You might diligently upgrade your app to new Rails versions but still have differences from how Rails’ default app generator now does things. This lets you see what those differences are.

Matheus Richard

Seamless Rails Upgrades: Expert Maintenance. Fixed Price— Upgrade RoR smoothly. We offer expert Rails maintenance at a fixed price. Secure, performant, minimal disruptions. Outdated gems? Breaking changes? We handle it.

reinteractive / CodeCare sponsor

Bsky Parser: Bluesky Text Parser That Outputs Rich Text Facets— If you’ve ever written code to post to Bluesky, you’ve probably run into what a headache it is to embed links, mentions, and hashtags properly. This aims to remove that headache.

Jonathan Yeong

• MiniMagick 5.2– A lighter/low-memory replacement for RMagick.

• StripAttributes 2.0– ActiveModel extension that strips all attributes of leading and trailing whitespace.

• Authie 5.0– Database-backed user sessions for Rails 7+ apps.

• 🦆 ruby-duckdb 1.2.0– Ruby bindings for the DuckDB database engine.

• nats-pure.rb 2.5– Ruby client for the NATS cloud native messaging system.

• 🤖 Honyaku– Get OpenAI to write i18n translations for Rails apps.

• Prosopite 2.0– Rails N+1 query auto-detection.

• sqlite3-ruby 2.6– Say hello to SQLite 3.49.1.

• RubyGems 3.6.5

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape:

• Repofiles(above) is an online visualizer of GitHub repos, their files, and space used (larger circles == larger file size). Consider, for example, this view of the main Ruby repo.

• Anthropic released Claude 3.7, a new version of its popular large language model, and reports and benchmarks so far show it's really good for coding.

• An interesting look at how Git's core contributors configure their own Git setups.

• I was intrigued to see how you can use pgRouting, an extension ostensibly for geospatial routing, to turn Postgres into a graph database of sorts.