~rubyweekly | Issue 730 - Ruby 3.4 - almost! (13)

Ruby 3.4.0 Release Candidate 1 Released — Christmas is almost here, and that means the imminent release of Ruby 3.4. If you haven’t played with it yet, 3.4.0-rc1 is worth trying as it includes everything the final release will, including the switch over to the Prism parser (so certainly worth testing). We’ll do a full 3.4 rundown once it’s released, but this is a...

Lightstorm: A Minimalistic Ruby Compiler — It’s not every week we get to hear of a new Ruby implementation or compiler, especially not on the official LLVM blog. Lightstorm (source here) comes from the same folks as DragonRuby and is largely motivated by potential performance gains.

💤 Make Rails Upgrades Budget-Friendly & Boringly Reliable — Stuck on Rails 5.2? FastRuby.io’s monthly maintenance keeps costs low and complexity minimal. Top engineering teams rely on Bonsai for gradual, 0-downtime upgrades—making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

Keeping Rails Cool: The Modern Frontend Toolkit — If you’re like me, building backend apps is the fun part and the frontend.. not so much. With numerous approaches to building frontends for Rails apps, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, but Irina explains four tools/approaches to keep things simple.

10 Tips from 10 Years of Hotwire Native — Admittedly, Hotwire Native only launched a few months ago, but Joe has been working with its underlying ancestor technologies for a long time.

Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer — If even looking at Python is sacrilege to you, skip this one, but Andrew does a reasonable job of comparing two rather different ecosystems, but one you may be asked to look at with Python's current lingua franca status.

Turbo Morphing Woes — We all know inventing the ship also invented the shipwreck. Morphing has some excellent applications but also comes with a new set of gotchas.

Product for Engineers: A Newsletter Helping Flex Your Product Muscle — Get curated advice on building great products, lessons from building PostHog, and the strategies of top startups.

Nokogiri v1.17.0: The Long Standing XML and HTML Library — As a mature library, Nokogiri doesn’t see many big updates, and while this is a stability/bugfix release, it’s a substantial one with improvements to the SAX parsers, fragment parsing, error handling, and schema validation. Keyword arguments have also been added to many methods, thanks to RubyConf 2024 Hack Day participants.

Rails Icons 1.0: Add SVG Icon Libraries to Rails Apps — You can set any one of a number of popular icon libraries as the default and then use those icons (which are dynamically pulled from their home repos) easily with a quick helper. GitHub repo.

rvm-windows 1.0: A Ruby Version Manager for Windows — Despite the name, this isn’t related to RVM but offers similar functionality for native Windows use cases (no Cygwin or WSL needed) whether at the traditional Windows command line or in PowerShell.

ferrum-har: Capture Ferrum Traffic to a HAR File — Quite niche, but quite handy too if you’re using the Ferrum gem to remote control a Chrome instance and you want to log the interactions in HAR format.

▶  Botcasts: A Do-It-Yourself Hotwire-Powered Podcast Player — This isn’t ready to run, but is the foundation for an interactive tutorial called Hotwire Essentials where you build a dynamic podcast player with the latest Rails and Hotwire features.