[HN Gopher] Optimizing Ruby Path Methods
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Optimizing Ruby Path Methods
        
       Author : weaksauce
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2026-04-18 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (byroot.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (byroot.github.io)
        
       | blinkbat wrote:
       | don't take this the wrong way, but -- people still use ruby?
        
         | nixpulvis wrote:
         | People should. I seriously miss using it at my day job. It's
         | not for code where type systems make things a lot more stable,
         | but it's great for scripting and quick things. Also ORMs in
         | ruby are truly nice, and I haven't found anything as good
         | anywhere else.
         | 
         | Generally speaking Ruby has the best APIs.
        
         | andreynering wrote:
         | Ruby on Rails is the GOAT. Nothing comes close in joy and
         | productivity, even in 2026.
        
         | vidarh wrote:
         | For pretty much everything. My terminal is in Ruby, with a Ruby
         | font renderer, running Ruby shell, and my editor is in Ruby, my
         | window manager, my file manager.
         | 
         | (Yes, I'm taking it a bit far; my prototype Ruby compiler is
         | self-hosting finally, so I guess sometime in the next 20 years
         | I'll end up booting into a Ruby kernel for no good reason...)
        
         | claudiug wrote:
         | ruby and rails is the only stuff that keep me doing web
         | development.
         | 
         | when I touch js, and python... I prefer ONLY AI agentic style
         | of working.
        
         | akerl_ wrote:
         | What's the right way to take this?
        
         | flats wrote:
         | Absolutely yes, all over the place! Startups are building
         | greenfield software with Rails as we speak. Loads of
         | established businesses have Ruby applications that are quietly
         | chugging along doing their jobs well. & Shopify, a company with
         | $1.6 billion in annual revenue, uses Ruby _very_ heavily & also
         | invests in the wider Ruby ecosystem.
         | 
         | Ruby is not without its drawbacks & drama, but it's elegant in
         | a way that few languages are to this day (how many JS
         | programmers _actually_ grok prototype-based object-
         | orientation?) & compared to NPM, RubyGems is (lately)
         | unexciting in the best way.
        
       | nixpulvis wrote:
       | Would this be possible to mainline into ruby in some way?
        
         | vidarh wrote:
         | From the article: "This new feature will be available in Ruby
         | 4.1.0."
        
           | nixpulvis wrote:
           | Thanks, missed that.
        
       | vidarh wrote:
       | > More importantly, on CI systems it's relatively common to check
       | out code using git, and git doesn't care about mtime
       | 
       | git doesn't care about mtime, but git maintains trees whose hash
       | changes if any constituent part of the tree changes. It'd seem
       | tempting to check for a .git and if present use the git tree to
       | determine whether to invalidate the cache.
        
         | byroot wrote:
         | Aside from the oddness of making this cache git aware, with the
         | new implementation I suspect querying git to revalidate the
         | cache would take longer than just rebuilding it.
        
           | vidarh wrote:
           | Looking up the hash of a tree in git is few enough operations
           | that I would be very surprised if that is true for all but
           | the smallest caches. If you were to shell out to the git
           | binary, maybe.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2026-04-18 23:00 UTC)