At the beginning of each year, the technology articles seem to focus on one topic only — trying to answer the question ‘Is *insert the technology here* still relevant? Ruby on Rails is no different. You might be surprised that even though it is over 15 years old it is not slowing down and still has a great group of supporters and newcomers.
2020 has brought a lot of changes, also to the Ruby community. Ruby 3.0 was introduced at the end of December bringing changes in performance and concurrency. Want to know more about those changes? How is it different from its predecessor? This article will sum up everything there is to know about the latest Ruby update.
Differences between Ruby and Ruby on Rails
Are you aware that there are probably some people who do not know the differences between Ruby and Ruby on Rails? Let me briefly explain to get everybody on the same page.
Ruby is an object-oriented scripting language. It is open-source, free and easily available. It has a very clear syntax making it easy to write and understand. Ruby is known for its balance between power and simplicity, which means programs written in it are usually scalable and easy to maintain. What is more, Ruby has features like dynamic typing and duck typing, flexible syntax, exception handling, variable scope, overloading etc.
On the other side, we have Ruby on Rails. It is a web application framework based on the model view controller (MVC) architecture. This means data is separated from user interfaces. To get it more easily differentiated, Ruby on Rails is referred to as simply Rails.
Ruby on Rails follows concepts like Don’t repeat yourself (DRY) and Convention over configuration (COC).
Why are we using RoR?
When talking about Ruby programming language, it is almost impossible not to mention Ruby on Rails. It is quite possible, people would not be aware of the benefits of Ruby if it were not for Rails. However, we should keep in mind that even without RoR, Ruby has quite a lot of advantages like versatility, freedom, user-friendliness, readability and compliance. When combined with Rails, it gets even better. Let’s mention a few of the pros:
- expressiveness — Rails team achieved a good balance with DSL making it easy to understand
- pragmatism — often mentioned when talking about Rails and is tied with Rails at the lowest level possible
- maturity — RoR has been around since 2005 and has been used by companies like Github or Shopify
- simplicity — Rails has been designed to build web software that can be used by real businesses
- community — maintainers still care and want people to use RoR so help is available at any time
- time-to-market — Rails is an amazing choice for MVP development since it supports fast coding
- security — RoR and Ruby are perfect for data-sensitive applications for healthcare, financial or eCommerce industries
- cross-platform — code written with Ruby can be run on various devices and operating systems
- cost-efficiency — you need to pay less for the development thanks to many free tools and libraries available
Changes in Ruby 3.0
After establishing that Ruby is still relevant and explaining its advantages, we can move on to discussing the changes Ruby 3.0 introduced.
Speed improvements
Ruby 3.0 is 3 times faster than Ruby 2! Optcarrot benchmark measured thread performance, based on NES’s game emulation workload and came back with an amazing score, in comparison to the previous version of the language.
