More Performance Improvements Coming To Ruby 3.5

#​751 — May 22, 2025

Read on the Web

????️ A slightly shorter issue than usual this week as I've been on-site at Google I/O for the past couple of days (no Ruby related announcements there, alas!). Back to full speed once I'm home next week!
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Ruby Weekly

Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5 — Tenderlove never rests! His latest post shows his work in Ruby 3.5 for slashing object‐allocation costs (up to 6× faster for keyword-heavy constructors). He walks us through the techniques behind this win and leaves us buzzing for 3.5’s eventual release later this year.

Aaron Patterson

Don’t Hire FastRuby to Upgrade Rails. Just DIY It ???? — What do next_rails, skunk, and RailsBump.org have in common? They're all open-source tools maintained by the FastRuby team to help you ship your next Rails or Ruby upgrade. Check out 8 tools we use in real client work (free and ready to use).

FastRuby.io | Rails Upgrade Experts sponsor

Ruby Namespaces 101 — Last week we featured a proposal to introduce virtual top-level namespaces to Ruby, and Xavier Noria has put together a more accessible digest of what they are, how they work, and how you can actually give them a try for yourself in an early form.

Xavier Noria

IN BRIEF:

• Microsoft has unveiled a new Postgres extension for VS Code. It brings IntelliSense completion to queries, GitHub Copilot integration, a visual way to explore your schemas, and more.

• Ruby Central has shared its latest monthly update with a focus on what happened at RubyKaigi and some RubyGems updates.

• Rails ecommerce framework Solidus has been with us for a decade, and now its just hit a milestone of 3 million downloads.

• There's an initial roadmap for Bundler 4, expected to land later this year.

• ???????? Rails World has shared its final speaker lineup.

It’s TRUE, SQL Supports Booleans — A tip for doing things in Active Record in a way that’ll work across database implementations.

Hartley McGuire

Managing Postgres Table Partitioning in Ruby — If your app uses a lot of data, Postgres’s table partitioning can offer a simple, transparent-to-Rails way to avoid many associated large data performance issues. Honeybadger has also created a gem to make it even easier to manage.

Benjamin Curtis (Honeybadger)

Don’t Measure What's Easy. Measure What Matters — Imagine Lord Business stops obsessing over story points. Data informs decisions—instead of controlling people.

Test Double sponsor

???? An Introduction to Functional Ruby – A 20-minute talk from this year’s Functional Conf that explores Ruby from a functional programming perspective. Keith Bennett

???? How to Get Composite Keys to Play with Rails View Helpers Joël Quenneville

???? Rails Controller Callback Order with Concerns Kevin Murphy

???? Getting Answers from a Big PDF with RubyLLM – And by “big”, Max is referring to PDFs large enough to not fit into usual context windows. Max Chernyak

???? Adding 'Sign in with Apple' to Rails Apps Exequiel Rozas

???? Code & Tools

OSV: A High Performance CSV Parsing Library — OSV brings a popular Rust-powered CSV parser to the Ruby world and boasts significantly faster performer than Ruby’s own csv. It’s highly configurable, supports numerous input sources (file paths, gzipped files, IO objects, strings), hash and array output formats, whitespace trimming options, and more.

Nathan Jaremko

???? Anthropic SDK for Ruby v1.0 — An official Ruby library for Anthropic’s various APIs to work with its popular Claude LLMs.

Anthropic

???? Word on the street is Anthropic's about to drop Claude 4 in the next few hours, so it'll be great to have an official way to work with it from Ruby.

???? Smart Augmentation: It's Not Always About Scaling the Team — How we helped a client achieve a shorter cycle time, lower infra costs and an improved communication.

SINAPTIA sponsor

• Rage 1.16 – HTTP API framework compatible with Rails. v1.16 adds a new WebSocket protocol: RawWebSocketJson.

• ViewComponent 3.23 – Build encapsulated view components in Rails.

• Rabarber 5.0 – Role-based authorization library for Rails.

• ruby-git (The Git Gem) 3.1 – Wraps calls to the git command.

• RDoc 6.14 – Ruby's long standing documentation generator.

• Meilisearch Rails 0.16 – Meilisearch integration for Rails.

• MockRedis 0.50 – A fake Redis in Ruby for your tests.

???? Did You Know..?

Ruby Weekly was our first ever newsletter, starting back in 2010, but over the years we've branched out to publish a variety of other newsletters you might not know about. You can see the very latest issues of each directly on their homepages:

???? Go Weekly is our regular check in with what's going on in the world of Go.

???? JavaScript Weekly, unsurprisingly, covers all things JavaScript — but also the JS ecosystem more broadly, including TypeScript, WebAssembly, Vue.js, and more.

⚛️ Adjacent to JS is React Status, covering the React and React Native world, and Node Weekly which goes deeper into Node.js, the npm ecosystem, and other server-side JS runtimes like Deno and Bun.

????‍???? Frontend Focus covers everything that appears browser-side! CSS, HTML, accessibility, WebGPU, browser updates – it's all in there.

???? Last, but not least, Postgres Weekly rounds out the family. It's the smallest newsletter, but always packed with great stuff as the Postgres ecosystem punches above its weight in terms of news and interesting releases. Its latest issue came out just a couple of hours ago.

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Peter Cooper, your editor