Ditch your version manager

Ditch your version manager
juliu.is

For me, the version manager that provides the nicest experience cross-platform is Cargo from Rust.

It can specify and pin specific versions. It is super easy to give to a fellow developer and have them reproduce the build. In addition, because Rust is suitable for low-level, high performance work, many times all the libraries you actually need are written in Rust and everything works very seemlessly (for example, there is no need to have libxml like the Ruby xml library needed, because you can probably write an XML parser in Rust that will be on par or better performance wise with libxml).

If we question our assumptions, the first question is: Why do we need multiple Ruby versions at all? Why isn't the latest version of Ruby sufficient? Well, obviously, Ruby's behavior has changed over time. But why isn't it backward-compatible? Why can't I just run Ruby 3.0 with a flag that tells it to emulate Ruby 2.6? Or 1.8 for that matter?

Okay another one. "Nokogiri" is the Ruby gem (library) for parsing XML (including HTML). You always need to remember to install libxml when you install it. Why? Why doesn't Nokogiri include an XML parser? Because it would be slow? You can include a native binary in the gem which does the hard computations. Will that work on random new architectures like M1? No? But you can fall back to a Ruby implementation and show a warning message. Also, what if I just need some quick XML parsing and don't care if the parsing is 1000x slower? Can I just get Nokogiri with the Ruby-implemented parser? No? Why not?

Then every single Ruby gem out there starts using newer Ruby features and thus, you must update your Ruby version. Why can't library authors gracefully handle older versions of Ruby?