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Comment by stanislavb | Hacker News Reader

Long live Ruby. It has never lost wide interest; however, it seems there's a king of resurgence around it recently.

I've been using Ruby for sound lately. It's a good exercise in optimization because Ruby's not that fast for numeric computation (without calling out to a C lib like Numo), so your algorithms have to be reasonable. I'm hoping that the various JIT efforts will eventually let me run multiple realtime voices in my synthesizer, without having to drop down to C.

I guess you might find this interesting, https://twitter.com/headius/status/1261024699837890561

Can you share any code? I'm interested in optimising interesting Ruby demos.

Yeah, here's my main sound repo: https://github.com/mike-bourgeous/mb-sound

There's also an FFI wrapper for jackd: https://github.com/mike-bourgeous/mb-sound-jackffi

I'm certain there are still improvements that could be made to the APIs and to performance, so I'm not currently releasing these on rubygems.

Edit: I should really try these with TruffleRuby myself. I'll try to reply here if I do.

Right now is an exceptionally good time to be a Ruby developer. There are so many jobs that pay well and the Stripes and the Shopifys of the world are eating all the great talent up.

I've been noticing how many recruiters have been reaching out to me with Ruby jobs. I try and explain that "Yes, I did Rails 2.3 and 3.x back in the day - but that was a LONG time ago". That doesn't seem to dissuade them in the slightest. Now, on one hand, recruiters are a hungry bunch. On the other, it's interesting to me how big of a need this is right now.

My guess is, that a ton of this stuff was built in the 2010s. Those Ruby developers have moved on... leaving a ton of infra behind. There's a desperate need for folks to come in and get to work on it. Most of these shops say things like, "all of our new stuff is in Elixir, but we still need to support all the old Rails stuff"

All I can say is, it's probably better than coming in to support VB... or COBOL!

arstechnica wrote an article on server side languages and ruby was the only one aside from php that had much growth!

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