#​798 — April 30, 2026

Read on the Web
Together with  FastRuby.io

Ruby Weekly

Spinel: An Ahead-of-Time 'Ruby' Compiler from Matz — Armed with AI, Matz has built a self-hosting compiler (for a subset of Ruby) that emits C which is then compiled to a native binary. It uses Prism for parsing and performs type inference. There are severe limitations (no eval or metaprogramming) and it can’t replace CRuby, but the performance potential is significant, though it's not a truly like-for-like comparison.

Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto

💡 I'm working on a deeper dive of Spinel for next week. There's a lot of interesting stuff to chew on, even as a research project. It's great to see Matz having fun!

🤖 Our Rails Upgrade Playbook, Now a Claude Code Skill — We just open-sourced our Claude Code skill for Rails upgrades. Built on 60,000+ hours of experience, from Rails 2.3 to 8.1. It dual-boots, runs your tests, and handles deprecation warnings. Give it a try! Don't have the time? Hire our team 🚀

Claude Skills by FastRuby.io sponsor

Scaling Ruby's Defenses with AI — An interesting update on Ruby Central’s efforts in using AI to find vulnerabilities in Ruby dependencies, such as this one in Nokogiri. Ruby has also been accepted into Anthropic’s Project Glasswing to put its state-of-the-art Mythos model to work at the task.

Colby Swandale (Ruby Central)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

🖐️ The Ruby on Rails Community Survey 2026 — Every two years, Planet Argon surveys the community. The results provide an interesting snapshot of preferences over time (here are the results from 2024 when Rails 7.1 and Ruby 3.3 dominated) so add your voice and help shape the Rails community.

Planet Argon

How ClickFunnels Cut Error Monitoring Costs by 33% — This Ruby shop ditched BugSnag for Honeybadger and now confidently deploys 15+ times per day. Read the case study →

Honeybadger sponsor

📄 The Official Guide to Building Your Own Gem – This tutorial has evolved a lot over the past 16 years, and is the canonical resource on the topic. Rubygems Team

📄 How I Built a Native iOS App with Rails and One YAML File – Joe built Ruby Native, a paid tool that converts Rails apps into iOS apps, to get a native-feeling app without Xcode or Swift involved. Joe Masilotti

📄 'The Rails Way' in 2026 Andrzej Krzywda (Arkency)

🛠 Code & Tools

IRB 1.18.0: The Interactive Ruby REPL — Once a core part of Ruby, irb is now distributed as a (bundled) gem so you can upgrade it independently. v1.18.0 gets a new ASCII art startup banner (above) which shows a random tip each time. IRB has now also entirely switched to Prism from Ripper, and method names within method calls get syntax-highlighted.

The Ruby Team

💡 Put IRB.conf[:SHOW_BANNER] = false in your .irbrc file if you don't want the banner to appear.

You Wouldn't Add a Second ORM. Why a Second Database? — TimescaleDB extends Postgres for analytics on live data. Same ActiveRecord queries, same connection. Try for free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Mustermann 4.0: 'Your Personal String Matching Expert' — A library used by projects like Sinatra, Hanami and Grape to create regexes from more natural-looking string patterns, as often used to define paths (e.g. /users/:id/*). v4.0 brings significant performance improvements. Its documentation page shows off the full range of what it can do.

Konstantin Haase

Perron 1.0: A Rails-Based Static Site Generator — A static site generator that lets you keep using Rails idioms but over content stored as Markdown, CSV, JSON, or YAML, with live reload via DOM morphing in development. You get feeds out of the box, too.

Rails Designer

raylib-bindings: Raylib 6.0 Bindings for Ruby — Raylib is a simple, popular C library for building games (2D and 3D) and when Raylib 6.0 landed last week, I wondered if I could use it with Ruby. The answer is yes! Here’s a Nokia-style ‘snake’ game I made as a test.

vaiorabbit