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Ruby 4.0.0

ruby-lang.org

11–20 of 197 posts

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#11
post #3

Ruby::Box looks useful.

Right now it is just the foundation I guess. That is, more work to be put on top of it. byroot kind of pointed that out that the proposal reminds him of containers and I think this is the long-term goal eventually, e. g. namespaced isolated containers. At a later time, I think, the syntax for refinements may be simplified and also be integrated into Ruby::Box, since Ruby::Box is kind of a stronger refinement in the long run. But that's my take; ultimately one has to ask matz about the changes. What he did say on the bugtracker was that this is to be considered a low-level API e. g. a foundation work. So things will be put on top of that eventually.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#12
It's never Christmas without a new ruby version.

The ruby::box thing looks pretty interesting, from a cursory glance you can run two simultaneous versions of something like a feature or rollout much more conveniently.

Also being able to do

  if condition1
     && condition2
    ...
  end

on multiple lines rather than one - this is pretty nifty too!

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#13

I haven't looked at Ruby for a long time. I've moved away due to the lack of typing. Any degree of typing would be helpful. Does it support typing yet?

There's an official format for defining types in separate files (RBS) and some tooling to type check them (matz doesn't like types next to the source code).

There's a pretty battle tested tool to define inline types as ruby syntax and type check both statically and at runtime[0].

It's still not a particularly nice situation imvho compared to typescript or python, but there's been some movement, and there's a newsletter that follows static typing developments [1] which may give you some insights.

0: https://sorbet.org/

1: https://newsletters.eremin.eu/posts

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#14

I haven't looked at Ruby for a long time. I've moved away due to the lack of typing. Any degree of typing would be helpful. Does it support typing yet?

Unfortunately, the type support is still useless. I abandoned Ruby for the same reason, and it is still relatively slow and eats a lot of memory.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#15

I haven't looked at Ruby for a long time. I've moved away due to the lack of typing. Any degree of typing would be helpful. Does it support typing yet?

There is [RBS](https://sorbet.org/) (part of ruby 3) and [sorbet](https://sorbet.org/). To be honest, these aren't widely used as far as I am aware. I don't know if it is runtime overhead, ergonomics, lack of type checking interest in the ruby community or something else. Type enforcement isn't a big part of ruby, and doesn't seem to be gaining much momentum.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#16

I haven't looked at Ruby for a long time. I've moved away due to the lack of typing. Any degree of typing would be helpful. Does it support typing yet?

Unfortunately, the type support is still useless. I abandoned Ruby for the same reason, and it is still relatively slow and eats a lot of memory.

It's literally faster than Python but ok.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#17

I haven't looked at Ruby for a long time. I've moved away due to the lack of typing. Any degree of typing would be helpful. Does it support typing yet?

We have been adding Sorbet typing to our Rails application and it is a positive enhancement.

It’s not like Ruby becomes Haskell. But it does provide a good deal of additional saftey, less testing, LSP integration is good, and it is gradual.

There is a performance hit but we found it to be quite small and not an issue.

But there are area of our application that use Grape and it is too meta for Sorbet so we don’t try and use it there.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#18

I haven't looked at Ruby for a long time. I've moved away due to the lack of typing. Any degree of typing would be helpful. Does it support typing yet?

There's an official format for defining types in separate files (RBS) and some tooling to type check them (matz doesn't like types next to the source code). There's a pretty battle tested tool to define inline types as ruby syntax and type check both statically and at runtime[0]. It's still not a particularly nice situation imvho compared to typescript or python, but there's been some movement, and there's a newslett…

I’ve used Sorbet on a project for 2 years recently and it honestly was the final nail in the coffin for Ruby for me.

Really rough around the edges, lots of stubs have to be added because support for gems is lackluster but whatever Sorbet generates are hit or miss etc. So you end up writing a lot of hard to understand annotations and/or people get frustrated and try to skip them etc.

Overall a very bad DX, compared to even typed Python. Don’t even want to compare it to TS because then it becomes really unfair.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#19
post #12

It's never Christmas without a new ruby version. The ruby::box thing looks pretty interesting, from a cursory glance you can run two simultaneous versions of something like a feature or rollout much more conveniently. Also being able to do if condition1 && condition2 ... end on multiple lines rather than one - this is pretty nifty too!

I've been doing

  if condition1 && 
       condition2
       ...
  end
for ages and it seems to work find, what am I missing with this new syntax?!

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#20
I'm happy to see v4.0, but 2025 was the year I switched from Ruby to Python after gradually drifting back to it more and more. The tipping point was when I had Claude Code automatically convert one of my Ruby projects to 100% Python - and after that, I just had no Ruby left.

I spent over a decade enjoying Ruby and even wrote a book about it. At this point, though, Python has won for me: fastapi, pytorch, langchain, streamlit, and so on and on.

It's a bit sad, but I'll always remember the Christmas gifts, and the syntax that is always so much better than Python.

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