As is traditional, Ruby 3.2 was released on Christmas day. The big news is that Shopify’s YJIT (Yet Another Ruby JIT) engine is out of experimental status and now considered production ready, having been battle-tested at Shopify for a year. As CEO Tobi notes:

Very good chance that YJIT is now running more ruby net code than any other VM. Shopify storefronts are a sizeable percentage of all web traffic!

Benchmarks show a performance improvement of ~40% over CRuby, so it’s exciting for all Ruby users, including us. I can’t imagine not looking into switching to JYIT in the new year.

Alongside Sorbet, Stripe was also working on a JIT, but with YJIT mainline, I think it’s safe to say that theirs stays Stripeware (if it’s even still being developed). Shopify’s demonstrated a healthier model for working with open-source projects – by maintaining close connection with the core teams (including Rails as well), their work goes upstream, and comes under the umbrella of collective maintenance. Stripe’s projects are in danger of ending up more like Facebook’s Hack), diverging far enough from the trunk to become a separate ecosystem.

Also nice to see is that YJIT is written in Rust, after a successful port in April. This in opposition to Stripe’s commitment to a C++ toolchain, and likely to keep the project more maintainable and more sustainable (and hopefully extend these properties to Ruby itself as it makes inroads to core, which is heavy C).