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Ruby 4.0.0

ruby-lang.org

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Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#61

Post by ksec »

byroot wrote: post #43
ksec wrote: post #6

It seems Ractor is still work in progress while Fiber has matured a lot in the last few releases. I vaguely remember reading Shopify is using Fiber / Rack / Async in their codebase. I am wondering if Rails will get more Fiber usage by default.

> It seems Ractor is still work in progress The Ractor experimental status could almost be removed. They no longer have known bugs, and only one noticeable performance issue left (missing Ractor local GC). But the API was just recently changed, so I think it's better to wait another years. > I vaguely remember reading Shopify is using Fiber / Rack / Async in their codebase. Barely. There is indeed this management obs…

I just search for the tweet again and it state [1] "Falcon is now serving most of Shopify storefront traffic: web and API.", or is that an out of context quote?

[1] https://x.com/igrigorik/status/1976426479333540165

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#62

Post by wiseowise »

dismalaf wrote: post #16
vmware513 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And has no ecosystem compared to Python.

Speed isn’t why people choose Python.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#63

Post by wiseowise »

gkbrk wrote: post #27
morcus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is being faster than Python considered to be a notable feature?

Python is one the most popular programming languages. Ruby fits into a similar category as Python (high level, interpreted scripting language, very dynamic, has a rich ecosystem with tons of existing code). Being faster than Python makes it more attractive to use, or port Python codebases to.

Nobody cares about Ruby outside of RoR

Python is one of the Lingua Franca of scientific, data, and most importantly, ai communities

Has much bigger community than Ruby

Has much, much better tooling story

Has much better gradual typing story

Isn’t THAT much slower than Ruby, there are far more attractive targets than Ruby if you care about performance

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#64

Post by nix-zarathustra »

nurettin wrote: post #47
RomanPushkin wrote: post #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, s…

Used Ruby for a decade, knew about it for more than that. I still sometimes use ruby syntax to communicate ideas with friends and colleagues. For me, the killer feature of Python was the typing module and the intellij pycharm community edition being free and RubyMine having a subscription fee.

RubyMine is free for non-commercial usage.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#65

Post by byroot »

WJW wrote: post #56
byroot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already truly run in parallel in Ruby 4.0. The overwhelming majority of contention points have been removed in the last yet. Ruby::Box wouldn't help reducing contention further, they actually make it worse because with Ruby::Box classes and modules and an extra indirection to go though. The one remaining contention point is indeed garbage collection. There is a plan for Ractor local GC, but it wasn''t sufficient…

I know they run truly parallel when they're doing work, but GC still stops the world, right? Assuming you mean "because with Ruby::Box classes and modules have an extra indirection to go though." in the second paragraph, I don't understand why that would be necessary. Can't you just have completely separate boxes with their own copies of all classes etc, or does that use too much memory? (Maybe some COW scheme might…

> GC still stops the world, right?

Yes, Ractor local GC is the one feature that didn't make it into 4.0.

> Can't you just have completely separate boxes with their own copies of all classes etc, or does that use too much memory?

Ruby::Box is kinda complicated, and still need a lot of work, so it's unclear how the final implementation will be. Right now there is no CoW or any type of sharing for most classes, except for core classes.

Core classes are the same object (pointer) across all boxes, however they have a constant and method table for each box.

But overall what I meant to say is that Box wouldn't make GC any easier for Ractors.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#66

Post by jurgenkesker »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #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, s…

This year I also switched from Ruby to Kotlin on my hobby/light commercial backends. I just can't stand the way Ruby is not statically typed, and the resulting insecurity around if everything is actually doing what it should do. Kotlin gives me joy, and performance is actually better (trading memory requirements ofcourse, but that's not a big problem anymore). I still love Ruby, but only use it for simple scripts now.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#67

Post by byroot »

ksec wrote: post #61
byroot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems Ractor is still work in progress The Ractor experimental status could almost be removed. They no longer have known bugs, and only one noticeable performance issue left (missing Ractor local GC). But the API was just recently changed, so I think it's better to wait another years. > I vaguely remember reading Shopify is using Fiber / Rack / Async in their codebase. Barely. There is indeed this management obs…

I just search for the tweet again and it state [1] "Falcon is now serving most of Shopify storefront traffic: web and API.", or is that an out of context quote? [1] https://x.com/igrigorik/status/1976426479333540165

I know that tweet, it's real, but that doesn't contradict my comment.

They indeed replaced Unicorn by Falcon in one application, but falcon is configured in "Unicorn mode" (no concurrent requests). So the gain is effectively 0.

Also note how they don't share any performance metrics, contrary to https://railsatscale.com/2023-10-23-pitchfork-impact-on-shop...

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#68

Post by magmostafa »

Ruby 4.0's parallel execution improvements are a game-changer for the ecosystem. The ruby::Box feature addresses one of the biggest pain points - GIL limitations - while maintaining Ruby's elegance.

What's particularly exciting is how this positions Ruby for modern workloads. With proper parallelism, Ruby apps can finally compete with Go and Node.js in concurrent scenarios without sacrificing developer happiness.

The typing improvements also can't be understated. Gradual typing strikes the right balance - it helps teams scale codebases without forcing the verbosity of Java or the complexity of TypeScript's type gymnastics.

Looking forward to seeing how the Rails ecosystem adopts these features. This could spark a Ruby renaissance in 2025.

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#69

Post by [deleted] »

magmostafa wrote: post #68

Ruby 4.0's parallel execution improvements are a game-changer for the ecosystem. The ruby::Box feature addresses one of the biggest pain points - GIL limitations - while maintaining Ruby's elegance. What's particularly exciting is how this positions Ruby for modern workloads. With proper parallelism, Ruby apps can finally compete with Go and Node.js in concurrent scenarios without sacrificing developer happiness. The…

[deleted]

Re: Ruby 4.0.0

#70

Post by pansa2 »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #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, s…

> fastapi, pytorch, langchain, streamlit, and so on and on

It's telling that your reasons for switching are all features of Python's ecosystem, not of the language itself. A lot of developers are moving to Python because of its libraries, and in many cases they don't care for the language at all.

That's causing a problem for Python: many of these developers who'd rather be using different languages seem to want to morph Python into their language of choice. The result is that the Python language is pulled in many different directions, and with each release gets increasingly bloated and strays further from its foundations.

Ruby, on the other hand, has a community that's mostly made up of people who actually like the language. That allows it to do a much better job of staying true to its core philosophy.

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