Ruby Committers and the World - RubyKaigi 2026

Discussion Topics for the Ruby Committers at RubyKaigi 2026

(not all topics were covered during the session)

Transcript

1. Ruby Commi tt ers and the World Presented by Shopify Moderated by Leo (@lchin)
2. ˒ All Ruby Commi tt ers at RubyKaigi are on stage ˒ Just like the monthly Ruby Developers Meeting ˒ Watch the Ruby Commi tt ers discuss a variety of interesting and fun topics! What is "Ruby Commi tt ers and the World"?
3. ˒ This session will be bilingual: Feel free to use English or ೔ຊޠ ˒ Shout-out to the JA->EN interpreters ❤ ˒ Please state your name before speaking ˒ Feel free to comment and ask questions in Discord #rubykaigi-a How this session works
4. Luke Gruber @luke-gru Introducing New Ruby Commi tt ers since RubyKaigi 2025 Satoshi Tagomori @tagomoris Max Bernstein @tekknolagi Stan Lo @st0012
5. Discussion Time
6. Integer#popcount or String#popcount ? I don’t want to implement popcount anymore
7. Should we introduce a conclave process (e.g. linux) for Ruby?
8. Revisiting a topic from 2025: Has anything changed?
9. Ruby in the AI era.What does the AI era demand from programming languages? Conciseness, speed, veri fi ability, ecosystem, metaprogramming, naming. Which grow, which fade, which endure? Where does Ruby stand?
10. AI assisted rewrites of standard library C extensions into pure Ruby (e.g. recent date PR, discussed in jimlock’s talk on Day 1)
11. Can we move away from setjmp/longjmp?
12. Could we use open source LLM models like Gemma 4 to replace the current implementation of the did_you_mean? What challenges will we possibly face?
13. Any new APIs or $LOAD_PATH values for RubyGems and others to resolve require target paths, to stop overriding #require? (or hooks to support other requirements like load error hooks, etc)
14. Built in support for tracing (e.g. Perfe tt o) in the runtime, with optional userland event API (e.g. request start/end)
15. Storage strategies (like Martin in 2022) for Array, Hash
16. Can we move away from conservative GC?
17. Adding Object#deep_freeze so you don’t need Ractor.make_shareable just to deeply freeze an object.
18. Revisiting "frozen_string_literal"
19. Time's Up!