#​780 — December 18, 2025

Read on the Web
Together with  Tiger Data logo

Ruby Weekly

What's New in Ruby 4.0 — It’s exactly a week till Ruby 4.0 is expected to land (on Christmas Day!) and while the official release notes will be the eventual ‘go to’ for discovering everything that’s new, Nithin has done a good job of rounding up the headline changes here.

Nithin Bekal

Ruby 4.0.0 Preview 3 Released — Can't wait for Christmas Day to unwrap 4.0? The latest preview is out along with a thorough set of notes on what’s new. There are hundreds of minor changes since preview 2, but notably bundle gem now has an --ext=go option to scaffold a native extension in Go (using go-gem-wrapper).

Yui Naruse

CERN Chooses TimescaleDB to Power Its Next-Gen Archiver — TimescaleDB brings PostgreSQL performance to a new level at CERN: faster writes, huge compression gains, and 10–40x faster queries. See why it’s becoming the new standard for historical data across 500+ control systems.

Tiger Data sponsor

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

How to Choose the Right Admin Gem for Your Rails App — The author of the Business Class Rails app starter template ponders the role of ‘admin panels’, particularly as 37signals’ new Fizzy app doesn’t come with one, and shares four potential well-built options.

Josef Strzibny

Why Are exec and run So Confusing? — André is working on the rv Ruby version manager and runner and explains the role of exec and run commands in rv as well as Bundler, npm, and Cargo – all of which have similar concepts but with slightly different takes.

André Arko

🧠 Smart Rails Applications Are Not the Future, They're the Present — We identify problems worth solving with AI and implement cost-effective solutions that save significant organizational time.

SINAPTIA sponsor

❄️ Add Snow to Your App with Stimulus – ‘Tis the season! Rails Designer

📄 The Ruby2JS Story: A Decade of Transpilation Sam Ruby

🎧 Jay Tennier on How Testing Platform Rainforest QA Tests Itself On Rails Podcast

📄 Beautiful Rails Confirmation Dialogs (with Zero JavaScript) Swanson and Margheim

📄 How the 'Load Path' Works in Ruby Michał Łęcicki

🛠 Code & Tools

TreeHaver: Cross-Ruby Adapter for the Tree-Sitter and Citrus Parsing Libraries — Working on MRI Ruby, JRuby, and TruffleRuby, TreeHaver attempts to offer the most universal, unified language parsing implementation available (for any structured language, not just Ruby). Here’s an example of using it to parse the TOML format.

Peter H. Boling

ruby-ti: A Static Type Checker for mruby, Written in Go — It parses mruby code, infers types, and catches type errors before runtime. It also includes LSP support for editor integration.

Hamachang

🚨 Stuck on Rails 5.2? Need a Complete Action Plan by FastRuby.io? — Our Roadmap is backed by 50k dev/hs of experience. No budget? No problem! Get our AI-enhanced Rails Roadmap in minutes.

The Rails Upgrade Roadmap sponsor

Kimurai 2.0: A Ruby Web Scraping Framework — A Capybara and Nokogiri based scraper that can use headless Chromium or Firefox to support JavaScript-rendered sites. It’s been many years without a release, but v2.0 brings things up to Ruby 3.x standards and adds Selenium Manager support.

Victor Afanasev

Loofah 2.25.0: Nokogiri-Powered HTML/XML Manipulation and Sanitization — A library for manipulating and transforming HTML/XML documents and fragments, built on top of Nokogiri, that also includes HTML sanitizers based on html5lib’s safelist.

Mike Dalessio

🏆  The Top 5 Ruby Videos of 2025

As judged by reader engagement across the year – not purely by views!

▶  1. Why to Use Jupyter Notebooks with Ruby — There have been a few attempts at bringing ‘notebook’ style programming, commonly associated with Python, to Ruby (e.g. IRuby) but Landon does a good job of explaining the why and the benefits here.

Landon Gray

▶  2. How To Build Basic Desktop Applications in Ruby — Technically a 2024 talk, but one we first linked to this year, by the creator of the Glimmer suite of Ruby DSL-driven desktop and Web app building frameworks.

Andy Maleh

▶  3. An Introduction to Functional Ruby — A 20-minute talk from this year’s Functional Conf that explores Ruby from a functional programming perspective.

Keith Bennett

▶  4. Rails 8 Unpacked: Inside the Default Dockerfile — A 10-minute explainer.

typecraft

▶  5. An Interview with Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto — Ruby’s creator Matz was interviewed about Ruby, his work-life balance, and experiences being a father. It’s not highly technical, but a good interview if you want to get a more rounded view of Matz and how he’s thinking about Ruby’s future.

Baltic Ruby

Want more? rubyevents.org is exactly what you need. It's an index covering over 8,000 talks from almost 700 events; many of them with videos. Luckily, there's a search feature, too, so you can just look for videos about Ractors or fibers, say.

🎄 This is the final issue of the year - in theory. We might drop a random issue to celebrate the Ruby 4.0 launch, but our next scheduled issue is on Thursday, January 8. If we don't see you again before then, we hope you have a happy holiday season!