Issue #822: How Rails made its enums 4.5x faster

#822 — October 22, 2026

Together with

📊 The 2026 Rails Community Survey Results — The results show a community favoring a familiar core stack (monolith, Postgres, Puma), a huge jump in adoption of mise, RSpec remaining the most popular testing framework, and widespread AI adoption, while half worry about the long-term value of their skills.

Planet Argon

💡 If you want something to read or listen to, you can also find out what people's favorite Ruby books and favorite Ruby podcasts are.

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FastRuby.io® | AI-native Upgrades on Autopilot sponsor

Static Analysis for the Uninitialized — Aaron, working through a static analysis textbook, builds an analyzer from scratch to find "possibly uninitialized variables" in Ruby. Sounds in the weeds, but by the end it parses real Ruby with Prism and flags a NameError before running.

Aaron 'Tenderlove' Patterson

💡 On the topic of Prism, there's some big news this week – see Code & Tools.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

💎 Ruby 4.0.8 has been released. It's billed as "routine", but is kinda significant as it fixes forked children hanging on hostname lookups on Linux, Ruby failing to build against the macOS 27 SDK, and a ZJIT bug that swapped keyword arguments.
📊 Erik Berlin has opened some PRs to speed up core methods, including pattern-defeating quicksort for numeric arrays (4-9x faster) and quicker Array#include?, Range, String and Time operations. Core members are considering which will land in 4.1.
A long-time gem author has archived all his Ruby gems, saying the "for humans" era of Ruby is over. An intense discussion ensued on Hacker News.
Rails has merged config.zjit, so ZJIT can be switched on after boot (as YJIT can). The PR's numbers show ~18MB less JIT memory used per worker.

Rails is a JIT Compiler (Or: How Aaron Made Enums 4.5x Faster) — Rails' enum predicates are built with define_method and public_send that JITs struggle to optimize. Aaron Patterson has made them real generated methods that are ~4.5x faster under YJIT in his benchmark. Coming to Rails 8.2.

Max Bernstein (Rails at Scale)

Rails Analytics on the Postgres You Already Know — TimescaleDB extends the Postgres behind your app so dashboards stay fast as data grows. Get $1000 credit to start.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

📄 Does Rails Still Make Sense? – Spoiler: yes. A good retort to anyone asking why you don't just get an LLM to rewrite all your apps in Rust. Dirk Jonker

📄 Eight Months in Next.js: A Rails Developer's Field Notes – An even-handed look at what Rails hands you for free. Werner Petrick (Puzzl)

📄 Short Written Summaries of 24 Rails World 2026 Talks – Handy if you skipped the videos! Yaroslav Shmarov

🛠 Code & Tools

Prism 2.0: Ruby's Parser Gets Its First Major Release in Two Years — Prism now underpins CRuby, Ruby LSP and RuboCop, so you're using it even if you never call it directly. It's now faster and leaner, with precompiled platform gems, complete RBS and RBI definitions, a C++ API, and Ruby 4.1 syntax support. There's also a Web-based playground where you can give it a spin.

Kevin Newton et al.

Net::SSH 8.0: The Pure Ruby SSH Client Library — The first major release since 2022. Ed25519, X25519 and ChaCha20 now come from the openssl gem, so separate gems are no longer needed. Defaults now track OpenSSH (e.g. SHA-1 RSA and DSA are off by default), plus ControlMaster reuse (i.e. connection sharing) and FIDO key support.

Miklós Fazekas et al.

Tired of Writing NRQL? AppSignal Builds Your Rails Dashboards for You — Dashboards that build themselves, plus deploy markers and uptime checks. Unlimited users, 30-day trial, no credit card.

AppSignal sponsor

Introducing RuboCop Spellcheck — A RuboCop plugin for checking spelling in Ruby comments, strings, identifiers, Markdown, RDoc, AsciiDoc, and plain text.

Daniel Doubrovkine

Passenger 7 Preview – The first major version since 2018. The headline is WebSocket support for Apache, and the minimum Ruby rises to 3.0.
WhatLanguage 3.0 – My pure Ruby natural language detector changes a few of the ISO codes it returns and gets a lot faster.
Logster 3.0 – Discourse's embedded log viewer for Rack apps (screenshot). Drops support for Ruby <3.3, Rack <3.1 and Rails <8.
Aruba 3.0 – Test CLI apps with Cucumber, RSpec or Minitest. Every scenario now gets its own working directory.
ViewComponent 4.17 – Now works under Rails' experimental Ractor mode.
Truemail 4.0 – Email address validation library. Now supports Ruby 4.

🪏 Digging into Ruby's past…

I've been working with Ruby for 22 years, but last week I noticed Ryan Davis (of Seattle.rb and Minitest fame) celebrating his 26th anniversary of using Ruby, and it got me thinking about Ruby's history which goes far beyond even that.

Ruby's 33 years old, so there's plenty of history to go over if you can find it amid the linkrot. Last week I discovered a new lead: a site which archives hundreds of programming mailing lists all the way back to the 90s. ruby-talk's on there and its archives go back to the very first post by Matz in 1998.

Today, ruby-talk is a quiet list with the Ruby Users Forum largely taking over its role, but at the list's peak in 2006 it hit over 6000 messages a month, so there's tons to go through.

I've been (very) slowly going through the archives to find interesting tidbits, so I wanted to share a few bits from the late 90s I enjoyed:

Matz shared the history of the Ruby project saying it was 'born' on February 23, 1993 (though it didn't get a public release till December 1995), explained his background as a programmer, and why Ruby came to be.
There was no RubyGems back then, so people would ask if Ruby should have its own central archive for modules with Matz saying he had a 'vague hope' to have such a thing 'someday'. The first attempt (the "RAA") appeared soon thereafter.
Ruby was getting ready for IPv6 as early as 1999. 27 years later, my ISP still doesn't support it… 😅
Dave Thomas, of Programming Ruby (Pickaxe) fame, first appeared in December 1999 asking a question about yield vs block.call.
Even in 1999, Matz was pondering a future where Ruby scripts could be frozen into executables.
Two years before JRuby started, Bryce Dooley came up with its name.

If you have any interesting data dumps, archives, or similar things relating to Ruby's ancient history – especially community stuff – hit reply and let me know, as I'd love to unearth any interesting gems, ideas, or discussions going on back in the day.