I’m still surprised that we haven’t seen much larger improvements in Ruby performance over the last decade given the large number of major tech companies using Rails.

Yes, I'm aware of 3x3 but for the most common usage of Ruby which if for Rails apps - there hasn't been anything like the gains PHP saw from 5.x to 7.x.

Especially from Microsoft, who has deep compiler/language expertise, and who owns GitHub (large Rails app).

flavorjones

Howdy, I'm on the Shopify team that is working on both pitchfork and a few different performance-improvement projects for Ruby. There's a ton of activity around Ruby performance right now!

I think we're entering a period of increased experimentation and rapid evolution as demonstrated by projects like YJIT[1][2], improved inline caching[3][4] and Object Shapes[5] (also used by V8), and variable-width allocation[6][7], and smaller improvements like better constant invalidation[8]. Significant investments in TruffleRuby[9] are still going on by Oracle, Shopify, and other companies.

And recently, Takashi Kokubun gave a talk at Ruby Kaigi about the future of JIT compilers in Ruby that gives a peek at a whole new set of optimizations Ruby can work on (as well as some performance comparisons against other interpreted languages)[10]. You may be surprised to see how well Ruby (with the JIT enabled) performs compared to Python 3.

All of which is to say, I think there's quite a bit of performance improvement being made in recent Rubies, and that trend will likely continue for quite some time.

update And I forgot to mention that some very notable computer science researchers and their teams are working in the Ruby community now![11]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28938446) [2]: https://speed.yjit.org/ [3]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18943 [4]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18875 [5]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18776 [6]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18045 [7]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18634 [8]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18589 [9]: https://eregon.me/blog/2022/01/06/benchmarking-cruby-mjit-yj... [10]: https://speakerdeck.com/k0kubun/rubykaigi-2022 [11]: https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-i...

bradgessler

Could you comment on any projects within Shopify that are helping Ruby's concurrency story? I'm aware of Ractors (https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/ractor_md.html) and Fibers, but it's unclear to how feasible these primitives currently are to build the necessary abstractions on top of them that would make Rails more concurrent.

https://github.com/socketry/falcon is an interesting project, but again, it's not clear how difficult it would be deploying a Rails app on top of this. My experience with these concurrency models in Rails apps is that one single gem could make a blocking IO call (for example) and negate all of the concurrency/performance gains. It would be cool if Ruby could be configured to throw errors for these types of calls to make finding and fixing offending gems easier.

There's a lot of really great projects happening and plenty to be hopeful about, but when that stuff will land or the changes the rest of the community and ecosystem should think about making still isn't clear.