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Why the Release of Ruby 3 Will Be Monumental (ruby3.dev)
5 points by enogrob on Nov 15, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


Longtime Rubyist here (but I haven't used it in the past few years).

I think that Ruby is almost perfect, so when I see headlines about Ruby 3 I usually think to myself "Uh-oh, monumental, eh? How did they ruin it?"

But in reality I think it's a good update, although perhaps not as "monumental" as shocking headlines call it.

> Ruby 3 is Fast

This seems like an answer to the common Ruby naysayer's chant: "But Ruby is slooow". We shouldn't pay attention to those people anyway. They don't understand the speed/expressability tradeoff, or are just trolling.

Why should we want "fast"? Is your ruby app doing a lot of processing? Well, it shouldn't be. That's what C++ gems are for. Go use them. You'll never be even a fraction as fast as C++, so while meager improvements are good, don't bet the company on Ruby getting faster in 4.0 and 5.0.

> Ruby 3 is Easy

Really confused by this one. Was there a problem with RVM? Was RVM not easy? What is this "gem dependency hell"? This sounds like it was totally fabricated to have another bullet point in the list. Also how is the "fancy-pants" RVM/rbenv-clone going to help with "praying a gem compiles"? Does it use a smarter C++ compiler? (Joking)

> Ruby 3 is Sleek

These are just reasons Ruby is sleek, even Ruby 1.0! Nothing related to v3 here.

> Ruby 3 is Here to Stay

This is obvious. But the real point here in this subsection seems to be that Ruby 3 has new features. But what?


Ruby 3 is an exciting update with lots of new features—yet I think it’s the psychology of turning over from major version 2 to 3 that is most vital to the future health of the Ruby community.




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