Optimizing Ruby Path Methods
32 points by weaksauce 3 hours ago | 14 comments

vidarh 2 hours ago
> 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.

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byroot 2 hours ago
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.
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vidarh 51 minutes ago
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.
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nixpulvis 2 hours ago
Would this be possible to mainline into ruby in some way?
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vidarh 2 hours ago
From the article: "This new feature will be available in Ruby 4.1.0."
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nixpulvis 48 minutes ago
Thanks, missed that.
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blinkbat 2 hours ago
don't take this the wrong way, but -- people still use ruby?
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vidarh 2 hours ago
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...)

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andreynering 2 hours ago
Ruby on Rails is the GOAT. Nothing comes close in joy and productivity, even in 2026.
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nixpulvis 2 hours ago
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.

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flats 40 minutes ago
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.

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x3n0ph3n3 23 minutes ago
It's my daily language and I don't even use rails nowadays.
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akerl_ 2 hours ago
What’s the right way to take this?
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claudiug 2 hours ago
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.

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