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Comment by kemiller | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or is Ruby experiencing a renaissance of sorts? There has been a bunch of positive press, and the community seems more active and vibrant than ever?

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I used to work primarily in Rails from Rails 3 and 4, then stopped to work with Go, then finally Elixir since 2016. For a long while there Rails was left behind with the crazy growth of clientside javascript and react. It was destined to become a BackboneJS/EmberJS of sorts, a once big thing but now dead and legacy.

With Rails 8 they really knocked it out of the park. Now there are real compelling reasons to use Rails 8. The job system, the auth generator, the rich text inputs, the file uploads, shit -- they have so much just baked in and omakase'd to death. It's quite an achievement. And it's beautiful to use. You get a phoenix liveview "feel" without breaking out of Rails vibes. If that makes sense.

I'm using it for a pet project of mine and have a really smooth experience leaving Elixir dayjob and jumping into Rails.

The biggest pain point with Ruby these days is: there is almost no libraries for modern number-crunching techniques of any kind. Only python libraries come out of machine learning community / academia.

It is true that Ruby may not have everything that Python has but it has some.

Can I invite you to browse the repositories here https://github.com/ankane?tab=repositories ?

the single man has the whole ml libraries on his shoulders :)

It is. Ruby on Rails 7 was a massive leap forward in developer experience and 8 is even better.

And on top of that Ruby itself has seen improvements from concurrency and parallelism to straight up speed gains, JITs, etc...

What people used to like about Rails, those haven't changed and it is also much better than before. ( Would still want more on Auth )

Hotwire, with Turbo. It has been improved and used in production for quite some time. This also got boosted a lot with JS front end fatigue.

Performance. Even by default Ruby 3.4 is quite a lot faster than 2.x era. But with YJIT it is in some cases nearly double and ~30-50% faster in Rails.

Whatever performance issues there used to be? We will have 256 Core Server in next 12 months, or 512 CPU Core in Dual Socket Setup. CPU Core is getting cheaper and faster.

I always like to say Ruby is the only Top programming language that doesn't have a big tech backer behind it. And it only recently found one. Shopify could now single handedly sustain the whole Ruby Rails ecosystem. It also means the whole ecosystem gets a lot more resources than it used to. ( YJIT is from Shopify )

they are also spearheading the ruby-lsp and rails-lsp gems and vscode extension which are in heavy development and getting better by the day.

it’s a shame that github, gitlab, airbnb et al aren’t doing more for the ruby ecosystem that they have benefitted from.

Yupp, been saying the same. I think the Ruby Team did the right thing to focus on performance for Ruby 3.

It's not just you. From one of the main contributors to Ruby Video[0]:

2024 is the year with the most Ruby talks in a single year, ever! This is the first time we beat the previous all-time record from 2015! Ruby is so back!

[0]: https://ruby.social/@marcoroth/113665539397868492

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