On the state of Ractors in Ruby

#​741 — March 6, 2025

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Ruby Weekly

What’s the Deal with Ractors?— Introduced in Ruby 3.0, Ractors provide an actor-based, truly parallel (bye GVL!) execution model, but they still remain experimental and any idea of their widespread use hasn’t panned out. Jean digs into what makes them tick, what they offer, and why they still have their uses, despite the current shortcomings.

Jean Boussier

💡 If you'd prefer a more introductory piece to ractors, this tutorial by Mirosław Pragłowski covers the practical bases of using them.

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Optimize Ruby App Performance in Real-Time— Visualize Ruby performance using detailed flame graphs to identify bottlenecks and latency. Debug and optimize your code by tracing requests across web servers, databases, and services with Datadog APM. Start a free trial today.

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The Pitchfork Story— Rails core member and Shopify engineer Jean led the development of a Rack HTTP server called Pitchfork. Here, he goes into a lot of fascinating depth about the motivations behind Pitchfork’s creation, the memory efficiency it offers, and teaches us quite a bit about Ruby along the way.

Jean Boussier

IN BRIEF:

• JRuby 10 (with Ruby 3.4 compatibility) is just around the corner and Charles Oliver Nutter is looking for your help in testing it out, particularly against third-party libraries.

• 🇬🇧 Did you know the British government uses an (open source) Rails app for publishing content on its official Web site? It's called Whitehall, after the area where the British government is largely centered.

• Ruby Central's latest monthly update focuses on RailsConf 2025 news.

• 👕 Ruby Tshirts is an attempt to create some Ruby-themed merch from Andy Croll of BrightonRuby fame.

Rails Views, Web Components, React.. Why Make a Choice?— A novel take on choosing an approach for your app’s views. Most shops pick Rails+Hotwire or React SPAs, but Aha! looks at where each view framework excels and uses them all.

Jeremy Wells (Aha! Engineering)

Using Phlex for Emails: Action Mailer Without ERB— Phlex has grown in popularity as a more OO ERB replacement and it suits emails pretty well too.

Camillo Visini

Keep Postgres Maintenance from Slowing Down Your Ruby App— Secure your spot to learn the proactive maintenance practices that uncover hidden database performance risks before they escalate.

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📄 Migrating from Rails Secrets to Credentials– A lot of helpful advice if you need to tackle the same process. Daniela Baron

📄 A Tale of 3 Aliases– How to choose between alias, alias_method, and alias_attribute. Mateus Pereira

📄 Decorating Arrays with SimpleDelegatorRyan Bigg

📄 Seeds of Destruction– A look at testing your db/seeds.rb setup so those seeds don’t turn into pesky weeds.. Louis Antonopoulos

📄 Rails 8 Assets: How Propshaft and importmap-rails Work TogetherRadan Skorić

📄 Migrating from Sidekiq to Solid QueueDonn Felker

📄 Understanding Insertion Sort in RubyJulie Kent

🛠 Code & Tools

Exeggutor: A Unified Interface for Managing Subprocesses— A library aiming to bring some added calm to dealing with the often fraught process of executing other programs from Ruby by way of exeg and exeg_async methods that can do it all.

Michael Eisel

🤖 OmniAI 2.0: A Unified Ruby API for Multiple AI Providers— If you’ve worked with hosted LLM platforms from Ruby before, you’ve probably used ruby-openai, but OmniAI abstracts things to support various platforms and their different features without shoehorning everything into the OpenAI approach. GitHub repo.

Kevin Sylvestre

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

ParallelTests 5.0: More Cores == Faster Tests— Speed up Minitest, RSpec, Turnip, Cucumber or Spinach by running in parallel across multiple cores. v5.0 brings Ruby 3.4 support.

Michael Grosser

The Git Gem 3.0: A git Wrapper for Use from Ruby— If you want to work with the git client from Ruby, this provides an interface.

Scott Chacon et al.

Phony: International Phone Number Normalizing and Formatting— For full, international E.164 standard numbers only.

Florian R. Hanke

• RBS::Inline v0.11.0– Embed RBS type declarations into Ruby code as comments.

• Pundit 2.5– Minimal authorization through OO design and pure Ruby classes.

• ⭐ Sidekiq 8.0– The background job processor. Changelog.

• Phlex 2.1.0– The pure Ruby view framework.

• Memery v1.7.0– Gem that simplifies memoization of method return values.

• React on Rails 14.2

📢  Elsewhere

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

• The term 'Ajax' was coined twenty years ago in this article. I still remember the early experiments of using XMLHttpRequest in Rails apps!

• Support for functions is coming to CSS and can already be experimented with in Chrome Canary.

• free-for.dev is a handy and huge (over 1000 items) list of hosted tools and online services with free developer tiers.

• 🤯 Pierre is one of the most 'intensively designed' Web sites I've encountered in a long while..

• TypeScript 5.8 has been released.