- Happy bday ruby!
For the usual doomsdaysayers saying "ruby can't X so I left it for Y", when X is typing, RBS is becoming the accepted standard (now that sorbet supports it),and RBS inline notation next to signature/code too (for peeps complaining about separate files); when X is LSP, ruby-lsp is the standard and already supports "go to definition" (its major hole for a long time), and its plugin architecture allows other other features to reuse the same code AST/index (So that each linter/formatter/type checker doesn't have to parse their own); when X is parallelism, ractors are have actually become performant in a lot of common cases, and it's only missing some GC improvements to be truly non-experimental.
There are new shiny things like ZJIT or Box, but even the core team recommends against using them in production for now. But they'll get better, as its been happening with the things listed above.
No wildly new syntax changes is also a good thing. Should help alternative implementations catch up.
- It's never Christmas without a new ruby version.
The ruby::box thing looks pretty interesting, from a cursory glance you can run two simultaneous versions of something like a feature or rollout much more conveniently.
Also being able to do
if condition1
&& condition2
...
end
on multiple lines rather than one - this is pretty nifty too!
by aaronbrethorst
0 subcomment
- It wouldn't be Christmas without a new version of Ruby. Thanks Matz and co!
by RomanPushkin
7 subcomments
- I'm happy to see v4.0, but 2025 was the year I switched from Ruby to Python after gradually drifting back to it more and more. The tipping point was when I had Claude Code automatically convert one of my Ruby projects to 100% Python - and after that, I just had no Ruby left.
I spent over a decade enjoying Ruby and even wrote a book about it. At this point, though, Python has won for me: fastapi, pytorch, langchain, streamlit, and so on and on.
It's a bit sad, but I'll always remember the Christmas gifts, and the syntax that is always so much better than Python.
by digitaltrees
4 subcomments
- Ruby is amazing. I recently built a layer on top of Rails that can generate an API from a single markdown file. I did the same thing in python but it was much harder and JavaScript would have been a beast. Ruby can meta program like nothing else.
- For someone wanting to learn Ruby in 2025/26, what are some good up-to-date references, outside of the official documentation? Are there any recently-published books which stand-out?
by mikestorrent
0 subcomment
- Still love Ruby deeply even though I now work somewhere where it's not in use. Thanks for the release, I hope I find a reason to use it!
- It's not overstating it to say I owe my entire SE career to Ruby.
Without it's accessible syntax, I don't know that I would have ever managed to overcome the initial "I have no idea what's going on" barrier. For whatever reason when I started out I found excess boilerplate & ceremony very overwhelming, and Ruby was the first language where I felt the joy of discovery more often than the frustration of cluelessness.
Although I've found myself gravitating away from object-orientation and towards languages that lean into functional principles, I will always hold a lot of fondness and respect for Ruby. For my brain and learning style, it's hard to imagine a better first language.
It's very cool to see how far it's come since 2.x!
- Glad to see internal stack traces cleaned up (maybe we can get relative paths some day?) and Set finally get the respect it deserves!
- Have they improved tooling? I've yet to get any lsp working on windows
- What's the relevance of ractors to the average web dev? Will ractors be useful directly in controllers/models/tasks? Or is it more that ractors will be useful to those working on the ruby language (and perhaps some gems - lower level stuff, perhaps), and therefore to the average ruby(/rails) programmer things 'just work', but faster?
- If I remember correctly, the namespaces feature (now released as Ruby::Box) had some pretty severe performance penalties (possibly even for code that doesn't use it?).
Does anyone know if that's been improved?
- It seems Ractor is still work in progress while Fiber has matured a lot in the last few releases.
I vaguely remember reading Shopify is using Fiber / Rack / Async in their codebase. I am wondering if Rails will get more Fiber usage by default.
- 3.x has been awesome, let's hope 4 will be even better!
- I love ruby so much
by desireco42
0 subcomment
- This really makes Christmas festive. I don't think I need new features, but sure love simplicity of 4.0.
I am installing it now. Thank you Matz and team.
- Now available on Heroku https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/3521
- My best Christmas gift <3 Love you Ruby.
- I would like multi-line comments to make it into Ruby one day.
- Ruby::Box looks useful.
- Am I the only one who expected something bigger in a major release?
With Ruby 3 we had the whole “3x3” story and significant performance improvements.
This release feels more like a minor version, something closer to 3.5.
I don’t want to downplay the work done by the maintainers on the contrary, huge thanks to them. But I do feel the version number is a bit misleading.
That said, the work on the ZJIT[1] compiler is massive. It’s serious, professional engineering, and definitely deserves respect.
[1]: https://rubykaigi.org/2025/presentations/maximecb.html
by andrewinardeer
0 subcomment
- It truly is Christmas.
by magmostafa
3 subcomments
- Ruby 4.0's parallel execution improvements are a game-changer for the ecosystem. The ruby::Box feature addresses one of the biggest pain points - GIL limitations - while maintaining Ruby's elegance.
What's particularly exciting is how this positions Ruby for modern workloads. With proper parallelism, Ruby apps can finally compete with Go and Node.js in concurrent scenarios without sacrificing developer happiness.
The typing improvements also can't be understated. Gradual typing strikes the right balance - it helps teams scale codebases without forcing the verbosity of Java or the complexity of TypeScript's type gymnastics.
Looking forward to seeing how the Rails ecosystem adopts these features. This could spark a Ruby renaissance in 2025.
by magmostafa
0 subcomment
- Exciting to see Ruby 4.0.0 released! The new conditional syntax improvements (if condition1 && condition2) are really elegant. The Ruby::Box feature for true parallelism looks particularly promising for CPU-bound workloads. This could significantly improve performance in scenarios where we've historically had to resort to external services or other languages. Looking forward to seeing real-world benchmarks and adoption patterns emerge.
- I gave it a try a few months ago. The first thing that I searched for was the REPL. Comparing it with Python, I prefer ipython over irb. It would be nice to see some improvement on DX on the REPL side
by ergocoder
11 subcomments
- I haven't looked at Ruby for a long time. I've moved away due to the lack of typing. Any degree of typing would be helpful. Does it support typing yet?
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