---
title: "An even faster future for JRuby"
publication: "Ruby Weekly"
issue: 719
published_at: "2024-09-12"
canonical_url: "https://rubyweekly.com/issues/719"
---

Plus more Rails 8 excitement, a change in leader for RubyGems, and some ways to enhance Active Record. |        

#​719 — September 12, 2024 

[Read on the Web](https://rubyweekly.com/issues/719)   

🇧🇦 It's been a quiet week in the Ruby world, probably as many folks are at the [EuRuKo](https://2024.euruko.org/) Ruby conference in Sarajevo, [including Matz.](https://ruby.social/@lucian/113123783478796029) If you're there, I hope you're having a great time!
__
_Peter Cooper, your editor_ 

Together with [![pgAnalyze\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/c_fill,g_auto,e_trim,w_350,h_100/e_make_transparent/co_white,e_outline:7/lhwcvgc1asd4fzaahty4.png)](https://events.zoom.us/ev/AjLb_w35d6V0uvJM17v2isooPfEMVuT7FpFLYnZCG-B-lUm6VHzl~AiPR31jBYed9jPF7iD7xD1fI6cj0Dcvm3GNuSoXkOK-JGoKmIFJMhMhLtYh3UP_0tAU1mwA9dNGkE3lFAZlRJdlfpg)   

Ruby Weekly 

[![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/f5x4exf5s1w2luvebnhf.jpg)](http://blog.headius.com/2024/09/jruby-on-crac-part-1-lets-get-cracking.html)  

[JRuby on CRaC: An Effort to Improve JRuby's Startup Time](http://blog.headius.com/2024/09/jruby-on-crac-part-1-lets-get-cracking.html) — [CRaC](https://openjdk.org/projects/crac/) is an OpenJDK project to speed up start times by using restorable checkpoints, and while JRuby is already a pretty fast implementation, its startup times could certainly be improved. Could CRaC be a big help? Yes! 

Charles Oliver Nutter   

[The Rails Renaissance](https://hashrocket.com/blog/posts/the-rails-renaissance) — Rails 8 has a lot of folks feeling bullish about Rails’ future. Long-time Ruby firm Hashrocket gives its reasons for getting excited here. 

Jack Rosa and Matt Polito (Hashrocket)   [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/941fd410.png)](https://events.zoom.us/ev/AjLb_w35d6V0uvJM17v2isooPfEMVuT7FpFLYnZCG-B-lUm6VHzl~AiPR31jBYed9jPF7iD7xD1fI6cj0Dcvm3GNuSoXkOK-JGoKmIFJMhMhLtYh3UP_0tAU1mwA9dNGkE3lFAZlRJdlfpg) 

[Hands on Postgres 17: What’s New & Impacting Performance](https://events.zoom.us/ev/AjLb_w35d6V0uvJM17v2isooPfEMVuT7FpFLYnZCG-B-lUm6VHzl~AiPR31jBYed9jPF7iD7xD1fI6cj0Dcvm3GNuSoXkOK-JGoKmIFJMhMhLtYh3UP_0tAU1mwA9dNGkE3lFAZlRJdlfpg) — Application performance depends on database performance. In this free webinar, learn how Postgres 17 enhancements, like faster B-tree scans, adaptive vacuum strategies, & streaming I/O updates, will impact your database performance & monitoring. 

pganalyze sponsor   

💡 Related to this, [Postgres 17 RC1](https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-17-rc1-released-2926/) was released last week.  

**IN BRIEF:** 

- Are you a Ruby-based consultant/consulting company? Ruby Central invites you to join a new facilitated online community and discuss a qualified vendor program that's in the works. [Register your interest here.](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeAD-dUBI4cNsjFaHGyFDj6f537wBhYtyM_akN_DS0UP1d5-g/viewform)
- [Marty Haught has become the interim lead](https://rubycentral.org/news/ruby-central-welcomes-marty-haught-as-interim-lead-for-rubygems-and-bundler/) of RubyGems and Bundler, taking up the reins from André Arko.
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland's [GenevaRB](https://www.rorvswild.com/blog/2024/genevarb-is-back) is back with a roster of dates for meetups through the rest of the year.
- Long anticipated, [Solid Cache becomes the new default caching backend](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/52790) for production deployments out of the box in Rails 8. [Ditto for Solid Queue.](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/52804)
- Jarred Sumner, the creator of the [Bun](https://bun.sh/) JavaScript runtime, said that [a lot of Bun is inspired by Rails.](https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/1833102987817836617)   

[A Tour of Ruby Modules](https://alchemists.io/articles/ruby_modules) — A comprehensive reference that covers all manner of module related topics, like use cases, hooks methods, and their use in various design patterns. 

Brooke Kuhlmann   

[Upgrading an App's Ruby Version with 'Dual Booting'](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/ruby-upgrade-using-dual-boot) — A smart and low-intrusive way to quickly test your app against an upgraded version of Ruby (going from 3.2.2 to 3.3.0 in this case). 

Vijay Vinod (BigBinary)   

▶[A Tale of Moving from Next.js to Rails](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blzd9MEyzcA) — Adam shows off what it took to move his company’s Next.js-powered marketing site over to Rails. _(15 minutes.)_ 

Adam McCrea   

[Comment Your Regular Expressions](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/comment-your-regular-expressions) — Comments are not always needed or appropriate, but this is good advice. 

Summer (Thoughtbot)   

[How to Use Azure Blob Storage with Rails](https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/azure-blob-storage-for-rails/) — For when you want to use something like S3 to store files but you'd rather use Azure. 

Jeffery Morhous (Honeybadger)   

[Roll Your Own Autoscaler](https://judoscale.com/blog/how-to-roll-your-own-autoscaling?ref=RubyWeekly) — Prefer to keep your autoscaling in-house? Here’s how we built ours. 

Judoscale sponsor   

📄 [Avoid this Bug with Numeric Environment Variables in Ruby](https://danielabaron.me/blog/numeric-env-vars-ruby/) Daniela Baron 

📄 [Avoiding Environment Conflicts with Kamal and Dotenv](https://nts.strzibny.name/env-conflict-kamal-dotenv/) Josef Strzibny 

📄 [A GitHub Trick to Find the Commit That Deleted a File](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240909-00/?p=110234) Raymond Chen 

📄 [Cache Key Versioning in Rails](https://www.mintbit.com/blog/cache-key-versioning-in-rails) Mintbit  

🛠 Code & Tools 

[![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/einh5yli7kpfw46dmtqx.jpg)](https://blog.splitwise.com/2024/09/11/super-diff-plus-splitwise/)  

[Splitwise is the New Maintainer of SuperDiff](https://blog.splitwise.com/2024/09/11/super-diff-plus-splitwise/) — [SuperDiff](https://github.com/splitwise/super_diff) _significantly_ improves RSpec’s diffing capabilities (see above) and is almost a ‘must have’ for RSpec users IMO. Its maintainer recently [retired from open source,](https://www.elliotwinkler.com/why-im-retiring-from-opensource) but Splitwise has taken over the reins. 

Joe Stein   

[has_some_of_many: Optimized Top-N-Per-Group Active Record Associations](https://github.com/bensheldon/activerecord-has_some_of_many) — Adds new optimized association methods (`has_one_of_many`, `has_some_of_many`) for ‘top N’ queries to Active Record using efficient JOIN LATERAL queries. 

Ben Sheldon   

[🚀 Need to Upgrade to Rails 7.2 + Ruby 3.3 but Not Sure How?](http://go.fastruby.io/upgrade-with-confidence) — Bonsai by [FastRuby.io](http://fastruby.io/) is the monthly upgrade service trusted by top-notch engineering teams. Upgrade with confidence. 

FastRuby.io | Upgrade Services sponsor   

[AnnotateRb: Add Annotations to Your Rails Models and Route Files](https://github.com/drwl/annotaterb) — A way to add comments summarizing the model schema or routes in your models, fixture files, test, specs, etc. This could also help any LLMs analyzing your code. 

Andrew W. Lee   

[ActsAsRecursiveTree 4.0: Query Complete Trees with Efficient SQL](https://github.com/1and1/acts_as_recursive_tree) — SQLite and Postgres support SQL syntax for recursively working through tree-like structures. This brings it to your Active Record models. 

Wolfgang Wedelich-John   

[AlchemyCMS 7.3: A Rails CMS Framework](https://github.com/AlchemyCMS/alchemy_cms) — A CMS you can run standalone or bake into your existing Rails apps, and which now supports Rails 7.2. There’s [a live demo](https://alchemy-demo.fly.dev/) too (the admin login is `demo`/`demo123`). 

Blish GmbH   

- [Lambdakiq 2.3](https://github.com/rails-lambda/lambdakiq) – Drop-in Sidekiq replacement to run ActiveJob atop SQS and AWS Lambda.
- [Rails Admin 3.2](https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin) – Rails engine providing a CRUD interface to your data. ([Demo.](https://rails-admin.fly.dev/admin/))
- [StoreModel 4.0](https://github.com/DmitryTsepelev/store_model) – Wrap JSON DB columns with ActiveModel-like classes.
- [OctoShark 0.6](https://github.com/dalibor/octoshark) – A simple Active Record connection manager.
- [Tomo 1.20](https://github.com/mattbrictson/tomo) – A CLI tool to deploy Rails apps over SSH.
- [Tolk 6.0](https://github.com/tolk/tolk) – Rails engine providing a UI for i18n work.
- [ruby-pg 1.5.8](https://github.com/ged/ruby-pg) – The Postgres client library for Ruby.
- [Vernier 1.2](https://github.com/jhawthorn/vernier) – Next generation CRuby profiler.         

Curated by [Peter Cooper](https://twitter.com/cooperx86) and [Glenn Goodrich](https://twitter.com/ruprict).
Published by [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/). 

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