pitchfork VS distribution

Depends what you are after and what you are constrained by.

Some people might be struggling with memory usage and may not see it as worth it, but for others who may have some extra RAM sitting around, it might come as a free perf increase.

As for memory usage, proper use of CoW can reduce it dramatically: https://github.com/Shopify/pitchfork/blob/master/benchmark/R...

Reforking yes, all explained here

This is something that kind of annoys me; there's even a /r/rails sub-reddit specifically for Ruby on Rails stuff. Understandably Rails helped put Ruby on the map. Before Rails, Ruby was just another fringe language. Rails became massively popular, helped many startups quickly build their Web 2.0 sites, and become successful companies (ex: GitHub, LinkedIn, AirBnB, etc). Like others have said, "Rails is where the money is at". However, this posses a problem for the Ruby community: whenever Rails becomes less popular, so does Ruby. I wish the Ruby ecosystem wasn't so heavily centralized around Rails, and that we diversified our uses of Ruby a bit. There's of course Sinatra, dry-rb, Hanami, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, and a dozen security tools written in Ruby such as Metasploit, BeFF, Arachni, and Ronin.

Welcome! Ruby isn't exactly "dying", but the hype/popularity is definitely fading. This is primarily because Ruby is no longer "new", most of Ruby's popularity came from Rails, and now Rails is no longer the "new hotness". However, Ruby still has lots of awesome features and lots of awesome other libraries and frameworks, such as the new fancy irb gem that uses reline, nokogiri, chunky_png, the async gems, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, Ronin, and the new Hanami web framework.

http://sciruby.com is working towards lowering that barrier

Ruby is mainly used in web app development because that's what makes money. However, Ruby is also used in Information Security (infosec) and there are a dozen or so Ruby security tools and libraries (metasploit, ronin, arachni, dnscat2, dradis). There's also SciRuby which aims to allow Ruby being used in the scientific/academic fields. You've probably heard/seen DragonRuby which is helping to popularize Ruby for simple game development. There's also a lot of interesting work happening around mruby and mruby-c (see mruby/c on Flipper Zero and mruby on DreamCast).