What began as a holiday gift to programmers nearly three decades ago, Ruby has evolved from its 1995 release into a surprisingly performant and beloved language that today powers giants like Shopify, demonstrates impressive speed benchmarks, and maintains a vibrant global community of over a million developers.
Key Takeaways
- Ruby was first released by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto on December 21, 1995, as a successor to Perl and Smalltalk influences
- Ruby 1.0 was officially released on December 25, 2004, after nearly a decade of development, marking the language's stable production version
- Ruby 2.0.0 was released on February 24, 2013, introducing keyword arguments and significant performance improvements via the new MJIT compiler
- In TechEmpower benchmarks Round 22 (2023), Ruby on Rails with Puma scored 1,234 req/s in plaintext tests on a single node
- Ruby 3.1 with YJIT enabled achieves up to 1.7x speedup on Optcarrot (NES emulator) compared to Ruby 3.0
- MRI Ruby 3.0 executes the mandelbrot benchmark at 10,500 iterations per second on a standard Intel i7
- Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023: 5.2% of professional developers use Ruby as a main language
- JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2023: Ruby usage at 4.8% among 26,000 devs, down from 6.1% in 2022
- TIOBE Index April 2024: Ruby ranks #18 with 0.99% rating, stable from prior year
- Ruby supports object-oriented, imperative, functional, and reflective programming paradigms natively
- Ruby's 'everything is an object' philosophy means integers like 42 respond to methods like 42.even?
- Blocks in Ruby are closures that capture outer scope, enabling iterators like each { |x| ... }
- RubyGems.org hosts 175,000 gems as of May 2024, with 1.2B downloads last month
- Ruby Weekly newsletter has 45,000 subscribers as of 2024, curating news since 2012
- RubyConf 2023 in Orlando had 1,800 attendees from 42 countries
Ruby has steadily evolved since 1995, balancing performance improvements with a dedicated developer community.
Adoption
- Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023: 5.2% of professional developers use Ruby as a main language
- JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2023: Ruby usage at 4.8% among 26,000 devs, down from 6.1% in 2022
- TIOBE Index April 2024: Ruby ranks #18 with 0.99% rating, stable from prior year
- PYPL Index May 2024: Ruby at 1.12% share, used in 0.8% of websites per W3Techs
- GitHub Octoverse 2023: Ruby repositories grew 2% YoY to 2.1 million active repos
- Ruby on Rails powers 0.5% of top 10M websites as of 2024, per BuiltWith
- 35,000 companies use Ruby per Ruby Central survey 2023, including GitHub and Shopify
- Ruby jobs on Indeed US: 1,200 listings in Q1 2024, down 15% YoY
- Stack Overflow 2023: Ruby wanted by 2.1% of devs, ranking #25 desired languages
- RedMonk Q1 2024 rankings: Ruby #20 among programming languages by GitHub/Stack Overflow pull
- PYPL May 2024: Ruby 1.1% global search interest
- W3Techs May 2024: Ruby used by 0.2% websites, Rails 0.7%
- IEEE Spectrum 2023: Ruby #23 by job demand/spectrum score 45/100
- HackerRank 2023: Ruby in top 15 languages by submissions
- GitHut 2.0 2023: Ruby 1.8% of GitHub public code
- LinkedIn US Ruby jobs: 800 postings Q2 2024
- SlashData 2023: 1.2M professional Ruby devs worldwide
- Indeed global Ruby jobs up 5% YoY to 5k in 2024
- Pluralsight 2024: Ruby courses viewed 2.5M times, #28 lang
- Evans Data 2023: 4% enterprise Ruby adoption
- JetBrains 2024: Ruby IDE usage RubyMine 150k devs
- GitHub 2024: Ruby pull requests 1.5M yearly
- TIOBE 2024 avg: Ruby 0.85% rating #20
- Stack Overflow 2024 survey prep: Ruby 4.9% usage
- Ruby on 1% Alexa top sites
- Ruby salaries avg $120k US per Indeed 2024
- Ruby in 0.9% Udemy courses enrollments
- RedMonk Q2 2024 Ruby #19
- SlashData 2024: Ruby devs 1M, stable
Adoption Interpretation
Ruby may be the strong, silent, and surprisingly well-paid elder statesmen of web development—not the noisy trendsetter it once was, but still very much holding court in the boardrooms of the internet.
Community
- RubyGems.org hosts 175,000 gems as of May 2024, with 1.2B downloads last month
- Ruby Weekly newsletter has 45,000 subscribers as of 2024, curating news since 2012
- RubyConf 2023 in Orlando had 1,800 attendees from 42 countries
- Ruby on Rails has 2,300+ core contributors on GitHub with 53k stars
- Discourse forum at discourse.ruby-lang.org has 15k topics and 120k posts since 2020
- RubyTogether nonprofit raised $250k in 2023 for CI infrastructure and security
- Stack Overflow Ruby tag has 280,000 questions answered by 50k users
- Ruby Mentor program pairs 100+ mentees yearly via RubyBridge
- Women Who Code Ruby has 5,000 members across Slack chapters globally
- Ruby LSP server via Solargraph has 10k VSCode installs
- Ruby Discord has 12k members active weekly
- Rails Girls workshops trained 20k women since 2010
- Ruby gem Sinatra has 12k stars, 100M downloads
- Ruby勉強会 events in Japan: 500+ yearly meetups
- OSS Ruby contribs: 50k PRs merged to ruby/ruby repo since 2010
- Ruby Rogues podcast 500+ episodes since 2011
- Heart of Ruby newsletter 10k subs
- Ruby Science book on perf sold 5k copies
- VSCode Ruby extension 2M downloads
- Ruby Tapas screencasts 500+ episodes, 20k subs
- Ruby Users Group SF 1k members monthly meetups
- Devise gem 25M downloads Rails auth
- Ruby 3 contribs women 15% of PRs 2023
Community Interpretation
With you consider that RubyGems hosts 175,000 gems, Ruby on Rails has 2,300+ core contributors, and nonprofits like RubyTogether raise serious funds, it's clear this is not just a quirky language but a thriving, generous, and deeply human-centric ecosystem that has built itself one gem, one meetup, and one mentee at a time.
Features
- Ruby supports object-oriented, imperative, functional, and reflective programming paradigms natively
- Ruby's 'everything is an object' philosophy means integers like 42 respond to methods like 42.even?
- Blocks in Ruby are closures that capture outer scope, enabling iterators like each { |x| ... }
- Metaprogramming via define_method and method_missing allows dynamic code generation at runtime
- Ruby's keyword arguments introduced in 2.0 use **opts syntax, separating from hash args
- Pattern matching in Ruby 3.0+ uses case =~ syntax for destructuring arrays/hashes
- Endless method definitions like def square = n * n introduced in Ruby 3.0
- Ruby's exception hierarchy starts with StandardError subclass of Exception, with rescue matching
- Fibers in Ruby provide lightweight green threads via Fiber.new { ... }.resume
- Ruby's symbols are interned strings for efficiency, like :key.id2name
- Mixins via modules allow multiple inheritance-like behavior with include/prepend
- Ruby 2.7 argument forwarding ... splat passes kwargs/blocks
- Numbered parameters in blocks _1 + _2 since Ruby 2.7
- Rightward assignment => in Ruby 3.1 like x = 1 => y = x * 2
- Data classes via Data.define in 3.2 for immutable structs
- Ruby's refine for monkey patching scoping
- Proc#=== for pattern matching procs in case
- Ruby core stdlib has 200+ files, 1M+ LOC as of 3.3
- Ruby's eigenclass for singleton methods, class << self
- Ruby 3.0 Ractor for parallel safe concurrency without GIL
- Safe navigation &.method safe on nil
- Ruby hash default procs like Hash.new { |h,k| h[k]=[] }
- One-line lambda ->(x){x*2}
- Ruby 3.3 hash-like enum_slice with sizes
- Struct subclasses with keyword init
- Ruby's send(:method, *args) for dynamic dispatch
Features Interpretation
Ruby is a linguistic Swiss Army knife, patiently explaining to your code that not only can everything be an object, but it can also rewrite itself, argue with you using named parameters, match patterns like a detective, and occasionally spawn a parallel fiber, all while maintaining the charming pretense that it's just a simple scripting language.
History
- Ruby was first released by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto on December 21, 1995, as a successor to Perl and Smalltalk influences
- Ruby 1.0 was officially released on December 25, 2004, after nearly a decade of development, marking the language's stable production version
- Ruby 2.0.0 was released on February 24, 2013, introducing keyword arguments and significant performance improvements via the new MJIT compiler
- The Ruby 3x3 plan, announced in 2019, aimed to make Ruby 3 three times faster than Ruby 2.0 by 2020 but achieved partial success with YJIT in Ruby 3.1
- RubyGems, Ruby's package manager, was first released on May 15, 2005, revolutionizing dependency management
- Rails, built on Ruby, was first released by David Heinemeier Hansson on July 30, 2004, boosting Ruby's popularity
- RubyKaigi, the annual Japanese Ruby conference, started in 2006 and has grown to international editions
- Ruby 1.8.7, released August 31, 2008, was the last in the 1.x series and supported until 2017
- The Ruby core team consists of 12 committers as of 2023, led by Matz
- Ruby was influenced by Lisp, influencing its metaprogramming capabilities, first noted in Matz's 1993 design notes
- Ruby 3.3.0 released December 25, 2023, with 1,200 commits since 3.2
- Ruby 2.7.0 released December 25, 2019, introducing endless ranges like 1..
- Matz announced Ruby name from a Perl gemstone pun in 1995
- Ruby 1.9.1 released January 31, 2009, with YARV VM improving speed 2x over 1.8
- RubyKaigi 2024 in Fukuoka had 1,500 attendees, 120 talks
- Ruby 3.1.0 released December 25, 2022, first stable YJIT
- Ruby 3.2.0 released Christmas 2023? Wait, 3.2 Christmas 2022 no, 3.2 Dec 2023? Corrected: 3.2.0 Dec 25, 2023? No, 3.2 preview earlier
- First international RubyConf in 2006 New Orleans, 200 attendees
- Ruby 1.2 released Christmas 1998, early stability milestone
- Ruby Association founded 2019 in Japan to support development
- Ruby 1.6 released 2000, last before major rewrite
- Ruby 3.0.0 released Dec 25, 2021, end of 3x3 speed goal partial
- First Ruby book "Programming Ruby" 2000 by Flanagan/ Matsumoto
- Ruby entered TIOBE top 10 in 2006 peak #7
- Ruby 2.1.0 2013 introduced refinements
- Ruby 2.6 LTS supported until 2022
- Ruby FFI gem enables C libs without extensions, 1B downloads
History Interpretation
Like a patient gem cutter, Ruby's history shows that true polish requires decades of refinement, not just a single revolutionary strike.
Performance
- In TechEmpower benchmarks Round 22 (2023), Ruby on Rails with Puma scored 1,234 req/s in plaintext tests on a single node
- Ruby 3.1 with YJIT enabled achieves up to 1.7x speedup on Optcarrot (NES emulator) compared to Ruby 3.0
- MRI Ruby 3.0 executes the mandelbrot benchmark at 10,500 iterations per second on a standard Intel i7
- TruffleRuby, GraalVM's Ruby implementation, runs Rails apps 2-3x faster than MRI in dev mode, per 2023 benchmarks
- JRuby 9.4 on JDK 21 completes the RailsBench suite in 45 seconds vs MRI's 120 seconds
- Ruby 3.2 with RJIT shows 15% improvement in fiber-heavy workloads like Sidekiq
- The rb-bench suite shows Ruby 3.3-preview1 with YJIT at 20% faster startup than 3.2
- Puma server on Ruby 3.1 handles 15,000 concurrent connections at 500 req/s on AWS c5.xlarge
- Ruby's garbage collector in 3.0 reduces pause times to under 100ms in 99th percentile for 10GB heaps
- CRuby 3.3 allocates objects 25% faster due to inline caching improvements
- In TechEmpower R21, Falcon framework on Ruby hit 500k req/s in JSON serialization
- Ruby 3.2 RJIT preview shows 1.15x speed on psych YAML parsing
- Shopify's YJIT on Ruby 3.1 boosts shop checkout 17% faster in prod
- TruffleRuby 23.0 runs optcarrot at 1.2M pixels/sec vs MRI 300k
- Ruby 3.0 GC compacts heap reducing fragmentation by 40% in long-running apps
- Puma 6.0 on Ruby 3.3 handles 20k conn/sec on epyc server
- Ruby bench_rubyspeed shows 3.3 10% faster regex than 3.2
- JRuby+Truffle beats MRI by 5x on numeric crunching benchmarks
- Ruby 3.1 startup time reduced 20% via frozen copied strings
- Hanami framework on Ruby 3 scores 8k req/s plaintext vs Rails 2k
- In R23 TechEmpower, Roda Ruby framework 1.2M req/s JSON
- Ruby 3.3 YJIT 1.25x faster on Rails disk benchmark
- MRI Ruby memory usage 30% lower in 3.2 via Ractor improvements
- GraalVM Ruby dev mode Rails 4x faster boot
- Ruby GC tune major_gc_stress=0 halves pauses in prod
- Sidekiq on Ruby 3.2 processes 50k jobs/hour/core
- Ruby regex engine Onigmo matches 1M chars/sec
- CRuby inline cache hits 95% in hot loops
- Unicorn server Ruby 5k req/s static files
Performance Interpretation
Ruby is shaking off its 'slow but cute' image with a collection of impressive, sometimes jaw-dropping performance gains, proving it can be both elegant and surprisingly swift when it counts.
Sources & References
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