Helix: Ruby Native Extensions Without Fear

Transcript

1. Previously…

2. Ruby is slow… – Usually it doesn’t matter – Most

   workload are I/O bound – But occasionally it does…

3. “Best of both worlds” – Native extensions – JSON gem

   – Very fast – Transparent to the user – Date, Pathname, etc…

4. Turbo Rails…? – String#blank? – Sam Saffron’s fast_blank – 50

   LOC in C – 20x speedup

5. But C… – Unsafe – Risky – segfaults! – Maintenance

   burden – Contribution barrier

6. Skylight Agent – Started with Ruby – Too much overhead

   – Native extension! – But C…

7. Meet Rust – Like C: compiled, statically typed, very fast

   – Unlike C: enjoyable to use, guarantees safety – “If it compiles, it doesn’t crash” – Same guarantee as Ruby, but without GC

8. Zero-cost abstractions™ – In Ruby: tension between abstractions and performance

   – Symbol#to_proc, Enumerable#map, etc – In Rust: no such tradeoff – Compiler is magic

9. fast_blank in Rust* * boilerplate not included

10. fast_blank in Helix

11. The vision – Keep writing the Ruby you love… –

    …without the fear of eventually hitting a wall – Start with Ruby – Move to Helix when appropriate

12. Last year – Good proof-of-concept – Too hard to use

    – Missing basic features

13. This year – Deploy to production – Polish, documentation –

    Features – Focus on Rails

14. Demo! – End-to-end example – Deploy to Heroku – It

    works!™

15. ▶ http://chancancode.tv/helix

16. Good use cases – CPU-bound – Simple inputs – Avoid

    chatty APIs

17. Good use cases

18. Good use cases – Use Rust libraries – Leverage Rust

    web browser tech – Mailer, Background job, Action Cable
19. None

20. Roadmap – Greenfield project – Drop-in replacement – Reopen class

    – Ship to production – Binary distribution – Non-traditional use-cases – Performance parity with C – Miscellaneous features and QoL improvements

21. usehelix.com