What's New in Ruby on Rails 8

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Scout Monitoring - Performance metrics and, now, Logs Management Monitoring with Scout Monitoring
Get early access to Scout Monitoring's NEW Ruby logging feature [beta] by signing up now. Start for free and enable logs to get better insights into your Rails apps.
www.scoutapm.com
featured
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
coderabbit.ai
featured
  • Ruby on Rails

    Ruby on Rails

    I think the ActionCable PR is here: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/50979 -- it seems like it's going well, but taking some time. I think that should be interesting for some use cases, but we'll have to see if/how that makes deployment/operations more complex. For example, if you're better off with the bulk of your app running w/ threads on Puma, would you run the ActionCable stuff w/ fibers on Falcon? Or maybe you just have an app that's doing mostly streaming of AI API responses or something?

    Anyway, I'd be careful about over-promoting Falcon/Async, even as one of the relatively few people that's running in a large-ish production app. In my case, I'm doing a LOT of hanging waiting on API responses from weather data sources, and I want to transform the JSON and do some data point conversion in real time. So even in my case, I think it's better for me to switch (see https://github.com/socketry/async-examples for me doing some experiments) because I'm often waiting on API responses (in real time) that can take 1-2 seconds (!) but then I'm still doing some heavy CPU work reading and writing JSON blobs. I saw a pretty good speedup with YJIT, so I think I'm not entirely IO bound, if that makes sense.

    I think it's great to have more options for those of us that love Ruby, so we don't need to switch to Node.js or something else for this kind of work. But I think it's likely that existing Rails apps (and typical CRUD Rails apps etc) will probably want to stick with a thread-based model. We'll see how it all shakes out over the next couple years, and I think you're right that it's exciting stuff. Between all the work on YJIT etc, and the possibilities for Node.js-type or Go type use-cases being possible/reasonable with Fibers, it's a great time for Ruby!

  • Scout Monitoring

    Performance metrics and, now, Logs Management Monitoring with Scout Monitoring. Get early access to Scout Monitoring's NEW Ruby logging feature [beta] by signing up now. Start for free and enable logs to get better insights into your Rails apps.

    Scout Monitoring logo
  • foreman

    an application that automates the lifecycle of servers (by theforeman)

    Still a bunch of stuff that runs on ruby that isn't webdev, https://github.com/theforeman/foreman is a big one I can think of. Ruby's quite nice for sysadmin tasks, puppet, chef etc all in ruby iirc.

  • kamal

    Deploy web apps anywhere.

    I don't know about Rails but Kamal 2 is pretty great.

    It's their own E2E solution for deploying and running Docker apps in production. Solves SSL, proxy, zero downtime deploys, etc.

    https://kamal-deploy.org/

  • falcon

    A high-performance web server for Ruby, supporting HTTP/1, HTTP/2 and TLS. (by socketry)

    I'm optimistic about Ruby's async story with the work Samuel Williams has been doing. https://github.com/socketry/falcon is the tip of the iceberg, which is built on top of https://github.com/socketry/protocol-http2 and a not of other repos at https://github.com/socketry.

    It's inspiring other's in the community to think of interesting applications, like using the HTML slot API to stream responses to HTML without JS. https://x.com/joeldrapper/status/1841984952407110037

    I know other frameworks have had asynchronous IO support forever, but it's finally coming to Ruby that seems like it will stick around and be well supported.

  • protocol-http2

    I'm optimistic about Ruby's async story with the work Samuel Williams has been doing. https://github.com/socketry/falcon is the tip of the iceberg, which is built on top of https://github.com/socketry/protocol-http2 and a not of other repos at https://github.com/socketry.

    It's inspiring other's in the community to think of interesting applications, like using the HTML slot API to stream responses to HTML without JS. https://x.com/joeldrapper/status/1841984952407110037

    I know other frameworks have had asynchronous IO support forever, but it's finally coming to Ruby that seems like it will stick around and be well supported.

  • thruster

    That new proxy they've developer "thruster" is written in go

    https://github.com/basecamp/thruster

  • Nest

    A progressive Node.js framework for building efficient, scalable, and enterprise-grade server-side applications with TypeScript/JavaScript 🚀

    * NestJS https://nestjs.com

    Is there anything better than these?

  • CodeRabbit

    CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers. Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.

    CodeRabbit logo
  • ActsAsTaggableOn

    A tagging plugin for Rails applications that allows for custom tagging along dynamic contexts.

    I think what parent said is referring to stuff like

    https://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on

    It's not only that RoR comes with a complete toolset -- it allows you to create your own libraries that extend the capabilities of the framework while keeping the developer experience terse enough through metaprogramming (compare the sample code in the README with the file acts-as-taggable-on/lib/acts-as-taggable-on/taggable.rb, where you can see how the library is opening the classes in runtime through the class_eval technique.

    Not sure how something similar can be achieved in C#

  • ruby-polars

    Blazingly fast DataFrames for Ruby

  • redwood

    The App Framework for Startups

  • .NET Runtime

    .NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps.

    Ruby does nail the minimalism in this code golfing example, but it does not offers uniquely high productivity to the end user, which is a frequently brought up point in defense of interpreted languages whenever their shortcomings are mentioned. Lacking static typing, Ruby users have to resort on e.g. Sorbet, which is a worse experience and numerous comments on HN seem to provide negative feedback on it.

    I do actually hate to mention performance every time, but it's difficult to not do so when apples-to-apples comparison can be made. Compiled statically typed languages with GC offer similar or better (because the code is verified by compiler, not Sorbet) productivity without any of the drawbacks that come with Ruby.

    This is to illustrate the point about the languages that do come with rich standard library, that also happen to go to great lengths at ensuring that shortest way to express something is also the fastest whenever possible.

    [0]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/src/libraries/Sy...

  • async-examples

    I think the ActionCable PR is here: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/50979 -- it seems like it's going well, but taking some time. I think that should be interesting for some use cases, but we'll have to see if/how that makes deployment/operations more complex. For example, if you're better off with the bulk of your app running w/ threads on Puma, would you run the ActionCable stuff w/ fibers on Falcon? Or maybe you just have an app that's doing mostly streaming of AI API responses or something?

    Anyway, I'd be careful about over-promoting Falcon/Async, even as one of the relatively few people that's running in a large-ish production app. In my case, I'm doing a LOT of hanging waiting on API responses from weather data sources, and I want to transform the JSON and do some data point conversion in real time. So even in my case, I think it's better for me to switch (see https://github.com/socketry/async-examples for me doing some experiments) because I'm often waiting on API responses (in real time) that can take 1-2 seconds (!) but then I'm still doing some heavy CPU work reading and writing JSON blobs. I saw a pretty good speedup with YJIT, so I think I'm not entirely IO bound, if that makes sense.

    I think it's great to have more options for those of us that love Ruby, so we don't need to switch to Node.js or something else for this kind of work. But I think it's likely that existing Rails apps (and typical CRUD Rails apps etc) will probably want to stick with a thread-based model. We'll see how it all shakes out over the next couple years, and I think you're right that it's exciting stuff. Between all the work on YJIT etc, and the possibilities for Node.js-type or Go type use-cases being possible/reasonable with Fibers, it's a great time for Ruby!

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts

  • Hey guys, just getting into programming and wanted to know if anyone has any tips or resources for learning Ruby as a beginner. Thanks in advance!

    4 projects | /r/ruby | 2 Apr 2023
  • Most Popular Backend Frameworks of 2021

    10 projects | dev.to | 10 Oct 2021
  • Most Popular Backend Framework of 2021

    6 projects | dev.to | 22 Sep 2021
  • What's New in Ruby on Rails 8

    8 projects | dev.to | 31 Oct 2024
  • Organizing YAML files by creating directories like `config/x` in Rails

    3 projects | dev.to | 20 Oct 2024

Did you konow that Ruby is
the 12th most popular programming language
based on number of metions?