Ruby Weekly

TruffleRuby 34 released with full Ruby 3.4 support

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#796 — April 16, 2026

Ruby Weekly

TruffleRuby 34: The Fastest Ruby 3.4 Implementation? — TruffleRuby is a high-performance Ruby built upon the JIT-heavy GraalVM, designed for dynamic languages. v34 brings Ruby 3.4 support (97% of ruby/spec) implementing every item in the 3.4 changelog, plus significant efficiency improvements.

Daloze, Menard and Konchyn

💡 I’ve been impressed by TruffleRuby. It supports many native extensions, runs most apps unchanged, and can deliver 10×+ speedups over CRuby on the right workloads, at the cost of slower startup. Worth a try.

Why FastRuby? "Their Services Are as Essential as Hosting" — How a Solo SaaS founder got fed up chasing contractors and switched to Bonsai. With fixed-cost maintenance, he got reliable Rails upgrades with minimal oversight. "I can't imagine doing business without this partnership." See how it works. 🚀

Bonsai by FastRuby.io® sponsor

RubyGems.org Now Has a Public Roadmap — The RubyGems repository is a big project with lots of moving parts, but it’s been hard to keep track of what they’re working on. Now, we can see what’s in the pipeline, including SBOM support, the ability to report suspicious gems, and making organizations generally available.

Colby Swandale (RubyGems)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

🎤 The On Rails podcast is back after a hiatus with an episode featuring DNSimple's Simone Carletti talking about how Ruby and Rails remain at the heart of DNSimple's multi-language stack.
RubyForum.org has been going from strength to strength lately. Well worth dropping in if you like the forum format.

The Gemfile of Dreams Returns for 2026 — This long-running living article distills several developers’ wisdom into a curated selection of useful libraries for building modern Rails apps. Strong recommendations of good dependencies.

Evil Martians

Vite on Rails Without the Proxy — The frontend build tool Vite runs a dev server. Propshaft (Rails’ asset pipeline) expects files on disk. They’ve struggled to share a stage without a Rack proxy (like Vite Ruby), but rails_vite makes their apparent incompatibilities seamlessly disappear.

Svyatoslav Kryukov

Coffee Time Webinar: AI Harnesses — On April 22 at 2 pm ET, senior devs will discuss AI approaches and why constraints are key to agentic coding outcomes.

Test Double sponsor

📉 TestProf 1.6 and Surprising Finds From Profiling 30,000 Specs – A writeup of halving the runtime of a 30k-spec test suite, plus the work behind TestProf 1.6. Vladimir Dementyev

📄 Approaches to Debugging Query Performance in Rails – A tour of techniques and gems, as well as tools for MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite. Amol Joshi

📄 Use Rails Combined Credentials – How to handle credentials the modern Rails 8.1 way. Andy Croll

📄 Migrating a Rails App from Heroku to Railway Juan Vasquez (FastRuby)

🛠 Code & Tools

CovLoupe: SimpleCov Coverage for Terminals, Scripts, and Agents — Provides a more accessible interface to the JSON output produced by SimpleCov via a CLI app, MCP server, or methods you can use in Ruby itself. Keith has ▶️ a screencast showing it off. I used it on my PureJPEG library and it was useful.

Keith Bennett

RailsPress: A Rails Engine for Blogging and Content Management — A mountable engine for Rails 8 that gives you blogging, CMS, and structured content management without building it from scratch. Think WordPress-style content management, but native to Rails.

Avi Flombaum

44 Postgres Talks To Choose From All in One Free, Virtual Event — Join POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026, a free & virtual Postgres developer event, 16–18 Jun. Check out the schedule.

Microsoft | AMD sponsor

📄 HexaPDF 1.7: PDF Generation and Manipulation in Ruby — A versatile PDF creation and manipulation library. There are lots of examples. Now with smart text extraction for text laid out on pages, plus ECDSA and DSA digital signing support. AGPL licensed with a commercial option.

Thomas Leitner

Spree 5.4: The Rails-Based Ecommerce Platform — A mature, open source Rails ecommerce system that’s gone API-first and now plays nicely with modern JS frontends, adding a TypeScript SDK and Next.js starter.

Spree Commerce

📰 Classifieds

💌 What is happening at Heroku?? Judoscale wrote a letter from the dev community, expressing our concerns.

wxRuby3 1.8 (above) – Cross-platform GUI library based on the native widget-focused wxWidgets. (Glimmer DSL for WX is another option to consider in this space.)
Cucumber 11.0 – Mature BDD framework that uses plain-English feature files to drive executable tests.
Serverless Rack 2.0 – Serverless framework plugin to deploy Rack-based apps. Now with Rack 3 support.
✉️ Devise::MultiEmail 4.0 – Devise extension adding support for users with multiple email addresses.
React on Rails 16.6 – Integrates Rails with server-side rendering of React.
Async::HTTP 0.95 – Asynchronous HTTP 1.0, 1.1 and 2 client and server.
Pry::StackExplorer 0.6.3 – Navigate the call stack interactively in Pry.
ruby-plsql 0.9 – Ruby API for calling Oracle PL/SQL procedures.
Prosopite 2.2 – Reliable Rails N+1 query auto-detection.
Rake 13.4 – Ruby's trusty Make-like build utility.

A maintainer's guide to Ruby's release cycle

Thu, 9 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#795 — April 9, 2026

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

A Maintainer's Guide to Ruby's Release Cycle — Core team member hsbt explains how Ruby 3.2 and 3.3 are reaching their end, how Ruby versioning works generally, who maintains what, and what terms like ‘security maintenance’ mean in the context of a Ruby version’s lifecycle.

Hiroshi Shibata

Your GitHub Actions workflows, but actually fast — Depot CI runs your existing GitHub Actions YAML — no rewrites needed. Pre-warmed sandboxes so jobs start fast, built-in caching, and SSH into any running job to debug. Migrate your workflows in one command: depot ci migrate.

Depot sponsor

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Hiroshi Shibata has drafted an initial design proposal for how dependency cooldowns / delayed updates could work in RubyGems and Bundler. Notably, per-gem granularity is avoided.
🌐 RubyGems.org has temporarily disabled access to localized/translated pages due to intense crawler activity.
🤖 Rails has gained an official AGENTS.md file aimed at AI agents being used to work directly upon the Rails code base (not regular apps).

Towards an Amicable Resolution with Ruby Central — Last week, Richard Schneeman and Ruby Central published a report into 2025’s contentious ‘RubyGems fracture’ and now former Bundler maintainer André has his say and makes two requests for the incident to be considered amicably settled.

André Arko

Dynamic Ruby and Hidden Maintenance Costs — ‘Clever’ has a cost, so it better have a valuable benefit. Ruby and Rails make metaprogramming easy, but in long-lived app code, explicit and boring often beats elegant and clever.

Daniela Baron

Protecting RubyGems.org from the Outside In — A quick update on work the RubyGems team has been doing to ensure the integrity of the gem registry, including password checks and validating gem contents at push time.

Colby Swandale

Building a (Frontend) Framework-Agnostic Gem — Let’s say you want your code to work alongside ERB, React, and Vue. There’s more than compatibility to contend with, as each approach has to feel right, which is the harder bit.

Joe Masilotti

AI Shouldn't Cost More Than It Saves — We can find where LLMs pay off, validate with real data, and tune for cost/effectiveness. Need help from experts? Let's talk.

Sinaptia sponsor

📺 Teaching Claude Code to Upgrade Rails – A lightning talk from Artificial Ruby, a New York-based Ruby group. Ernesto Tagwerker

📄 How to Publish Gems with Trusted Publishing – Once set up, it's as easy as pushing a tag to GitHub. RubyGems Guides

📄 From Sidekiq to Temporal: A Zero-Downtime Migration Strategy David Haley (FireHydrant)

📄 A Testing Anti-Pattern: Distracting Setup Data Jason Swett

🛠 Code & Tools

Coverband 6.2: Ruby Code Coverage, But in Production — SimpleCov is great for checking code coverage during testing, but Coverband takes the idea into production, checking live code usage with low performance overhead.

Dan Mayer

Parallel 4.0: Parallel Processing Made Simple — Run blocks of code in parallel processes, threads, or ractors using map, each, any?, and all?. v4.0 requires Ruby 3.3+ and adds ractor support for Ruby 4.x.

Michael Grosser

ActiveRecord + Postgres + Analytics. No New Stack Required. — TimescaleDB extends Postgres so analytics runs on live data. Same ORM, same queries, no pipeline. Start for free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Puma 8.0: The Rack Web Server Built for Parallelism — Among many small improvements, Puma gets smarter concurrency controls, including a feature for framework authors to mark requests as IO-bound to allow them to go past the normal thread ceiling, as well as the ability to change thread pool limits at runtime. The Puma 8 upgrade guide digs into all the details.

Nate Berkopec et al.

Ruby Deserves Beautiful Documentation — A Jekyll theme that emulates the much-admired docs theme that VitePress offers, minus all the JavaScript. The project's homepage is its own example of the output.

Carmine Paolino

JRuby 10.0.5.0 – The Ruby 3.4-compatible branch of JRuby gets a variety of bug fixes, adds formal Java 26 support, and JNR gains RISCv64 support.
🖼️ RMagick 6.3 – The final v6.x release of the popular bindings for the ImageMagick image processing library, now with deprecations to get you ready for the eventual ImageMagick 7-based RMagick 7.0.
🎥 Spectator Sport 0.3 – Record and replay user browser sessions in a self-hosted Rails engine.
Wombat 3.3 – Ruby DSL for scraping pages and parsing structured data.
Gems 2.0 – Ruby wrapper for the RubyGems.org API.
Grape 3.2 – REST-like API framework.
RubyGems 4.0.10

📰 Classifieds

Gauntlet. A 10-week no-cost fellowship building the AI-first engineers hiring managers need. Ship production AI. Land a $200K–$950K job.

🔬 "Absolutely essential for AI agent-written PRs." Undercover CI shows untested methods, right in your pull requests.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

📺 DHH joined Gergely Orosz on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast for an almost two hour long conversation covering his take on DHH's use of AI and agents, how 37signals builds apps, and what keeps DHH inspired to code.
Ally Piechowski shares the git commands she runs before reading any code. They provide a handy way to get a quick grasp on what's happening in larger, multi-contributor repos.
Sam Ruby experiments with running 'Rails' on the BEAM, Erlang's virtual machine (as also used by Elixir). It's not quite Rails as you'd expect though.
Keen to brush up your knowledge of modern JavaScript? Chris Coyier's What To Know in JavaScript (2026 Edition) tours the latest language features, plus the state of the most popular runtimes and build tools.
Cloud66's Kash Sajadi rounds up several Heroku alternatives in 2026 along with basic cost comparisons.
On the more creative side of things, someone's managed to port Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii and someone else has built a renderer for Doom in pure CSS.

The final report on the 'RubyGems fracture'

Thu, 2 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#794 — April 2, 2026

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Ruby Weekly

The 'RubyGems Fracture' Incident Report — A postmortem of the Ruby Central vs Bundler story in late 2025 which resulted in the Ruby core team taking stewardship of RubyGems and Bundler. The timeline of events is laid out in detail, but it’s unlikely to resolve the matter entirely (as demonstrated in this Reddit comment by Mike Perham).

Richard Schneeman (Ruby Central)

💡 The Register also has a good independent take on this update factoring in some of the responses to it.

How a Solo SaaS Founder Stopped Worrying About Rails Maintenance — "FastRuby.io is the steady baseline behind everything. They've simplified my life and freed me up to focus on what's important." See how Bonsai's fixed-cost monthly maintenance helped Tim go from chasing contractors to peace of mind.

Bonsai by FastRuby.io® sponsor

Ruby Native 0.4: Your Rails App in the App Store — Think Hotwire Native but without ever having to touch Swift, yet you still get native controls, navbars, menus, and iOS 26 styling. It’s now free right up to using TestFlight with your first 100 users. You only pay once you want to go live in the App Store.

Joe Masilotti

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Ruby 3.2.11 has been released to fix the recent zlib vulnerability, much as Ruby 3.3.11 did last week. Note that Ruby 3.2 is now EOL (End of Life).
🔠 Looking for a new editor font? CodingFont helps you find a good choice visually using a bracket-style faceoff.
🤖 The Ruby AI News newsletter is celebrating its first birthday and is absolutely packed with stuff.
Rubysyn is an interesting attempt to 'clarify Ruby's syntax and semantics'.

🤖 Rails Upgrade Methodology as Claude Code Skills — I actually used the raw MD files last weekend to upgrade a Rails 6 app to Rails 8 and it went well.

Ernesto Tagwerker (FastRuby)

Using Perfetto in ZJIT — The ZJIT team has added Perfetto tracing support to visualize and query slow events in Ruby's next-gen JIT. Deep technical content from the people building Ruby's performance future.

Max Bernstein (Shopify)

CI was designed for 2015. Your deploy frequency wasn't. — Depot CI: 2-3s job starts, parallel steps, SSH debugging. Run depot ci migrate to move your GitHub Actions in minutes.

Depot sponsor

📄 Migrating 9,000 Tests from RSpec to Minitest with AI Agents Viktor Schmidt

📄 Improving on Sandi Metz's Gear Class from POODR – *gasp!* Jason Swett

📄 Handling Uncountable Words in Rails Inflections – Like staff, metadata, feedback.. or maybe sheep? Andy Croll

📄 Teach Rails Irregular Plurals with Inflections — So criterion becomes criteria, say. Andy Croll

📄 Fixtures on Purpose: From Accident to Artifact Mike Moore

🛠 Code & Tools

🏖️ Holidays 9.0: Methods to Deal with Those Special Days — Just in time for Easter! Days off, vacations, public holidays.. whatever you call them, your app might need to know about them. Holidays covers such days the world over using its YAML-based definitions.

Holidays Team

Your Rails App and Your Analytics Belong in One DB — TimescaleDB extends Postgres so analytics runs on live data. No second database, no pipeline, no sync lag. Try free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Safely 1.0: Rescue and Report Exceptions in Non-Critical Code — The idea is that while you may want to know about exceptions in certain blocks of code, they might not be serious enough to require crashing out. Sends exceptions to a variety of services out of the box.

Andrew Kane

re2 2.25: Ruby Bindings to Google's RE2 Regex Library — A safer alternative to backtracking regular expression engines. v2.25 adds a variety of new features including RE2.extract which does a match-and-reformat in one step (so you provide a source text, regex, and the desired output format including backreferences).

Paul Mucur

📰 Classifieds

🧐 A cheaper Heroku? Our cost comparison calculator puts the PaaS alternatives head-to-head.

SerpApi is a Web Search API that gives developers real-time, structured access to search engine results. Try SerpApi for free.

Become an AI-first engineer. Gauntlet is a full-time fellowship, no cost. $200K+ roles. Next cohort starts 4/27. Apply Today.

Inertia.js 3.0 – Provides glue between React, Vue and Svelte SPAs and non-JS server-side frameworks like Rails and Django. More on v3.
🔎 rbspy v0.45 – Sampling profiler for Ruby processes that can be used without restarting them. Now supports Ruby 3.2.11 and 3.3.11.
ruby.wasm 2.9.0 – An official collection of WebAssembly ports of CRuby. Here's a handy cheat sheet.
ActiveHash 4.1 – Use hashes as a read-only data source for ActiveRecord-like models.
Gemstash 2.8 – Run your own local gem server and caching proxy for RubyGems.org.
Bunny 3.0/3.1 – RabbitMQ client library. Here's what changed in v3.0.
The Twitter (X) Ruby Gem 8.3 – Ruby interface to the official X API.
Parallel 1.28 – Run code in parallel processes, threads, or ractors.
Ruby-LSP 0.27 Beta 1 (now using Rubydex)
Rack 3.2.6, BigDecimal 4.1

How to install a Ruby gem the hard way

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#793 — March 26, 2026

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

How to Install a Gem (It's Harder Than It Sounds) — As one of the people behind Bundler 1.0 and a former maintainer of RubyGems.org, and now working on gem.coop and rv, André knows a few things about how gems tick (big understatement). This post is full of ‘aha’ moments as he walks through installing a gem by hand, giving us an idea of what tools like gem and rv do for us.

André Arko

A Solo Founder Story: 'I Got Fed Up Chasing Contractors' — Tim tried hiring and outsourcing, but nothing fit. Then he found Bonsai. Now he gets reliable monthly Rails maintenance with almost no oversight. "FastRuby.io works independently. I can trust their work without worrying if something will break."

Bonsai by FastRuby.io® sponsor

Building Browser-Based Ruby Tutorials with Tutorialkit.rb — TutorialKit.rb is a toolkit for building interactive Ruby (and Rails!) tutorials that run in-browser with WebAssembly. This post tours building your own experiences, shares working examples right in the post, and explains the tech behind it all, including a custom Ruby WASM build that can run Rails.

Pazderin and Dementyev (Evil Martians)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Ruby 3.3.11 has been released with a fix for the recent zlib vulnerability. This is the final normal maintenance release of Ruby 3.3, so it's time to plan an upgrade to 3.4 or 4.0.
Early-bird tickets for RubyConf 2026 (taking place this July in Las Vegas) are available. Dave Thomas is one of the keynoters.
Lots of minor Rails releases this week: Rails 7.2.3.1, 8.0.4.1, and 8.1.2.1 to fix a variety of security issues, and 8.0.5 and 8.1.3 as regular bugfix releases.
🏴 Haggis Ruby 2026 is a Scottish Ruby conference returning this April 23-24 with a fantastic lineup.
JetBrains released RubyMine 2026.1, the latest version of its Ruby IDE.

Meet Duck Typer: Your New Duck Typing Friend — Duck typing gives us polymorphism for free, but what if you want the interface to be enforced? Duck Typer does just that, asserting that a set of classes share compatible public interfaces, catching signature drift and missing methods without fuss.

Thiago Araújo Silva (Thoughtbot)

AI Shouldn't Cost More Than It Saves — We can find where LLMs pay off, validate with real data, and tune for cost/effectiveness. Need help from experts? Let's talk.

SINAPTIA sponsor

📄 Ten Ways CSV.read Can Silently Corrupt or Lose Your Data – Pitches SmarterCSV (a library of 14 years' maturity) as the solution. Tilo Sloboda

📄 Transfer Manager Directory Support for AWS SDK for Ruby – The AWS SDK for Ruby Transfer Manager now supports directory uploads and downloads. Juli Tera (AWS)

📄 Deploying a Rails 8 App with Kamal on Hetzner – An exhaustive step-by-step walkthrough of the process. Mooktakim Ahmed

📄 Migrating from Devise to Rails' Authentication Generator Nithin Bekal

🛠 Code & Tools

Nokolexbor 0.7: A Faster Drop-in Replacement for Nokogiri — A Lexbor-based HTML5 parser that’s multiple times faster than Nokogiri. Ruby 2.7 is dropped, but Ruby 4.0 is supported and gets precompiled gems (installed in <4 seconds on my machine).

SerpApi

wreq-ruby: An HTTP Client with Real Browser TLS/HTTP2 Signatures — Uses the Rust-powered wreq under the hood to make HTTP requests that appear as if they come from mainstream browsers by using the same headers, TLS extension and cipher suite ordering, HTTP/2 frame settings, etc.

SearchApi

Your Rails App Has an N+1 Problem. AppSignal Will Show You Where — Auto detect N+1 queries, slow ActiveRecord calls, and memory leaks in your app. One gem, and you're monitoring in minutes. Free 30-day trial, no card required.

AppSignal sponsor

Rubyx-py: A New Way to Call Python Code from Ruby — A Rust-powered bridge between Ruby and Python’s C APIs that brings Python into the same memory space as Ruby and shuttles objects back and forth (with no IPC or serialization) and uses uv to manage dependencies.

yinho999

💡 rubyx-py is clearly experimental, so I gave it a try. Segfaults-a-plenty till I used Ruby 4.0.2 compiled with --enable-shared, but it works! I'll blog about this soon as it opens up some interesting capabilities.

simplecov-compare: Compare Coverage Reports Over Time — SimpleCov reports show the test coverage of code at a point in time, but this will help you track changes over time.

Kevin Murphy

🤖 ruby-mcp-client 1.0 – Ruby Model Context Protocol (MCP) client, now with latest spec support including support for audio content, OAuth 2.1 enhancements, and a full RubyLLM integration example.
🤐 Top Secret 1.0 – Filter sensitive information from free text before sending it to external services or APIs.
🖼️ pure-jpeg 0.3 – My pure Ruby JPEG encoder/decoder library is now much faster (0.2s on a 1024x1024 image) thanks to some third-party contributors 🎉
The Ultimate Turbo Modal for Rails (UTMR) 3.0 – Tailwind or vanilla CSS modal dialog implementation for modern Rails apps.
Chewy 8.0 – A high level framework for Elasticsearch.
💬 telegram-bot-ruby 2.6 – Ruby wrapper for Telegram's Bot API – now supporting Bot API 9.5.
Avo 4 Open Beta – A popular framework for building Rails apps for internal tools.
💳 Stripe Ruby Library 19.0 – Stripe's official library.
RubyGems 4.0.9

📰 Classifieds

🙋‍♂️ What’s next for Heroku? Jon has some thoughts.

♦️ Build Ruby apps that never lose state, even when things fail. Learn by building an app from scratch in a free Temporal Ruby SDK course.

Help us save the German healthcare system - Develop the leading healthcare stats platform with a small dedicated team in a stress free environment (Cologne based).

💎 Hiring Senior Ruby on Rails Engineers at EverAI: 50 million users, fully remote. Not used Ruby lately? That's okay, you can still apply!

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Four years ago, we first mentioned Thanos, an experimental Ruby to Go transpiler. Its author has recently wielded AI to 'finish the job'. I took it for a spin and it's very cool, but type inference demands and a lack of metaprogramming make many potential use cases a no-Go...? 😅
37signals made its Fizzy Kanban app, built in Rails, 'source available' a few months ago but maintained the paid, SaaS version. That paid version, however, is now entirely free to use.
🤖 GitHub has announced that, starting late April, data (including inputs and snippets) from Free, Pro, and Pro+ Copilot users will be used, by default, to help train future AI models. You can, however, opt out.
🔒 More than ever, it's essential to ensure no secrets have snuck into your repos. Secretlint is a linting tool dedicated entirely to the task. It's written in Node but can be used with Docker against projects of any language.