Hi there, I'm Nathan. I'm currently working as a backend lead developer at Linkers.
Our team at Linkers attended RubyKaigi 2022 as a Platinum Sponsor! It was my first time attending RubyKaigi and I wanted to share my experience.
RubyKaigi was held in Tsu, Mie over 3 days.
Takeaways
Ruby is getting faster: in particular the JIT compiler is receiving a lot of support. A competing compiler YJIT is currently in development that promises to bring a number of performance improvements.
Zero bugs: Well.. not actually, but compared to the same time of last year there are significantly less bugs and that trend will continue. Credit to Jeremy Evans and the team for clearing out a number of longstanding bugs. 🙏
Investment: it was very evident from the presentations this year that Shopify has made a huge investment into Ruby. They self-proclaim to run the world's biggest Rails app so they stand to benefit the most from improvements/upgrades. They've been pouring a lot of resources into Ruby and have been leading the charge on many fronts (along with the Ruby core team). Kudos to them for investing in the development of language itself, which will ultimately benefit the community.
Ruby WebAssembly: Ruby can now be run directly in the browser. There's an education appeal that may be promising. More practically, writing Wasm serverless functions could prove to be useful too.
Highlights
- The TRICK 2022 (day 1) event was definitely a highlight. There were some amazing creations and I'm still not quite able to wrap my head around.
- Yuki Yokoo gave his presentation using a Sega Mega Drive 🕹️
- Ruby is not dying 💪
- 🥩
Top 3 Presentations
The following are my personal favorite, but all the talks at RubyKaigi were really great and people should check them out.
Heaping on the complexity! An adventure in GC Compaction: a really good breakdown of Ruby's GC. Particularlly nice animations and explanations.
Implementing Object Shapes in CRuby: an interesting talk on Object "shapes" with practical examples and breakdowns.
Real World Applications with the Ruby Fiber Scheduler: The presentation started with Samuel's goal to make a DNS server and it was really nice to see how the Fiber Scheduler has helped him solve that. Also practical improvements to Falcon and Rails too.
Bonus: Matz Keynote was a nice reminder of the value of Ruby. ❤️
Participating as a Sponsor
Linkers participated in RubyKaigi as a Platinum Sponsor. We had the chance to not only show ourselves, but also meet others in the community. Thank you to everyone who stopped by our sponsor station!
- I enjoyed meeting other in the community
- I enjoyed seeing which other companies are using Rails (there were many!)
Conclusion
This was my first RubyKaigi and I was really impressed with the warm welcome from the community.
I'm personally excited to use Ruby 3.2. There are many ambitious goals to improve Ruby that were announced at the conference and I think developers should be excited for a faster and more performant Ruby. We might not see all the upgrades for a while, so I'm excited for 3.3. and future versions too.
Regarding the talks, I was surprised at how little Ruby there actually was compared to C and assembly instruction code. It seems to be a trend that a lot of the optimizations and development is happening at a lower level, that we Ruby developers will unknowingly benefit from.
If I were to attend again I would:
- brush up on some C or do some sleuthing into projects like YJIT beforehand
- review the Ruby CHANGELOG beforehand
Thank you to the organizers and volunteers. I had a great time meeting others in the community.
References
[1] RubyKaigi images
