Sam Ruby

The plan in Keep the Gems ended with "Falcon and Ractors last, once each request is cheap enough that the server model is what matters."

Yesterday's post ended with Roundhouse's futamura target at 1.00× Rails on the Lobsters benchmark, and a ceiling for it of 2.5–3×.

In 2023 Shopify's Rails at Scale team turned Lobsters into a Rails benchmark for YJIT: a real application, real routes, a fake-data database, SQLite in memory, so that work on the JIT would be measured against Rails as people write it rather than against a

DHH opened Rails World by saying what he believes, plainly, and betting his company on it.

Tobi Lütke ported ONCE Campfire to Ruby 4 without Rails: Falcon serving from worker Ractors, plain modules over SQLite, and message passing between Ractors instead of Redis.

In The Browser Half I looked at the part of a Hotwire app where nothing checks anything: the strings that wire Stimulus controllers to each other and to Ruby.

Hifumi generates a complete Rails application from a natural-language prompt.

In As If I compared two ways of making Campfire fast: compiling the Rails app with Roundhouse, and porting it by hand to Rust, as 37signals did with once-campfire-rust.

The below was 100% written by a human.

I built these for Roundhouse, which compiles Rails applications, and Campfire needs all three: Action Text sanitizes every message through rails-html-sanitizer, which is built on Loofah, which is built on Nokogiri and Crass.

Yesterday, in Partly in the Right, I asked where the information comes from when an agent produces a result, and what checks it.

I'm speaking at Deccan Queen on Rails in Pune, October 8–11.

I watched the opening keynote at Rails World 2026 expecting a talk on "Shaping the Future of Ruby on Rails."

Three days ago I ran the five-endpoint blog fixture through a 2×3 — stock Rails and Roundhouse's emitted Ruby, each on CRuby+YJIT, JRuby and TruffleRuby — and the result inverted June's: Graal rewarded stock Rails 3.4× and the emit only 1.8×, because a ru…

For anyone arriving cold: Roundhouse transpiles Rails applications to other languages; Campfire is Basecamp's MIT-licensed chat app and the one I use to find out what that takes; and Spinel is Matz's ahead-of-time Ruby compiler, so the thing that comes out

Three months ago I put the same small Rails application through a 2×2: stock Rails and Roundhouse's emitted Ruby, each on CRuby+YJIT and on JRuby.

Five months ago, yesterday: Initial commit: typed IR, Ruby round-trip, Rust struct emit.

For anyone arriving cold: Spinel is Matz's ahead-of-time Ruby compiler.

This is a work in progress.

For anyone arriving here cold: Roundhouse transpiles Rails applications to other languages, and Campfire — Basecamp's MIT-licensed chat app — is the one I have been using to find out what that takes when the app pushes as well as responds.

Two days ago I published a fragment cache and a sentence I was pleased with: one of our processes beats their eight.

Two days ago I published a benchmark page whose headline was that Rails wins, and ended the post by naming what would change it: The six-times gap is a fragment cache, and that is the next real piece of work: Campfire's own cached: true partials, served f…

Four days ago Campfire chatted, and I wrote that the sockets would get measured "when the measurement can't quietly lie."

Deccan Queen on Rails is October 8–11 in Pune, and I've been asked what I'm bringing.

The recording of There Is No Server is up.

Four days ago Campfire compiled, linked, and booted, and I called it a floor.

Three days ago I wrote that when Campfire builds — "and it will build, then break, then build again".

Roundhouse now has four applications in flight.

Six days ago I published a ledger that didn't flatter: the compiled Lobsters served ten of twenty-six routes, thirty-nine of 354 of its own tests passed, and the benchmark page opened with a banner declining to stand behind its own timings.

Go look at rubyonrails.org right now.

Two days ago I ended a post deliberately in mid-air: the Roda spike's results were sitting in front of Jeremy Evans, and whether it lived, died, or got tweaked was his call to make, not mine.

Spinel is Matz's ahead-of-time Ruby-to-C compiler, and this month it acquired an unusual asset: a 40,000-line application it could not compile.

At RubyConf on Thursday I argued that there is no server — that Rails is a declarative spec, the compiler is the query planner, and the deployment target is the execution plan.

At noon today, Pacific time, I'll open my RubyConf talk on the Main Stage in Las Vegas by asking a few hundred people to take out their phones.

In the talk, the tenth rung of the ladder gets a single line and a "hold that thought": typed Ruby ─▶ Spinel ─▶ C ─▶ machine code That rung is three compilers standing on each other's shoulders: Roundhouse turns a Rails application into the subset…

send is the method that isn't supposed to compile.

Every performance number in this series so far has come from a single application: the quintessential Rails blog demo, five endpoints, modernized with Turbo and Tailwind.

The posts in this series so far have described machinery — an oracle, an IDE, a flow analyzer — and gestured at a destination.

Live Types for Rails made an observation: the type inference Roundhouse builds because transpilation demands it — what class is @status, what does this scope return, can this be nil — is worth having on its own.