~rubyweekly | Issue 738 - Using JITs for faster FFI in Ruby (10)

Tiny JITs for a Faster FFI — FFI (Foreign Function Interface) lets Ruby call dynamically-linked native libraries, but it can impose a performance tax. Aaron Patterson demonstrates this ‘FFI tax’ and experiments with JIT-compiling FFI bindings to dramatically boost performance.

The Role of Size Pools in Ruby Garbage Collection — Garbage collection improvements have fuelled a lot of the performance gains in Ruby 3.2 onwards. As a part of his Ruby Under a Microscope rewrite, Pat runs an experiment showing how Ruby uses size pools to speed up allocating memory for new objects.

Ruby Source Parsing — A look at several interesting ways to dynamically work with Ruby source and to extract useful information.

Flexible API Versioning with Rails — There are two truths about API versioning: 1. It’s required. 2. It’s hard to do right. Petr offers an example of how fast it can go wrong, followed by a more maintainable method to keep things sensible.

Fixing asdf 0.16.x Breakages — Last week, we mentioned that the popular asdf runtime version manager was entirely rewritten in Go. This caused Dave’s setup to break and here’s how he fixed it.

Rhino Editor: An Action Text Compatible Rich Text Editor — As well as being a clean, simple rich text editor, a big selling point is being able to use ProseMirror and TipTap plugins, as well as some good docs page.

🔭 Ephem: Track Positions of Space Objects Accurately in Ruby — From the creator of the Astronoby astrometry gem comes a new space-themed release for tracking the position and velocity of ‘major Solar System bodies’ using data supplied by NASA.

🫠 AI Isn’t Magic, and It Isn’t Here to Save You — It won’t fix messy workflows, tech debt, and shaky fundamentals on its own. AI doesn’t replace developers—it raises the bar for them.

ImageProcessing 1.14: High-Level Image Processing Wrapper for libvips and ImageMagick — “The goal of this project is to have a single gem that contains all the helper methods needed to resize and process images.”

Ruby Boy: A Game Boy Emulator Written in Ruby — A fun one! You can play it in the browser, too, thanks to WebAssembly and ruby.wasm. (GitHub repo.)