Previously…

Ruby is slow… – Usually it doesn’t matter – Most workload are I/O bound – But occasionally it does…

“Best of both worlds” – Native extensions – JSON gem – Very fast – Transparent to the user – Date, Pathname, etc…

Turbo Rails…? – String#blank? – Sam Saffron’s fast_blank – 50 LOC in C – 20x speedup

But C… – Unsafe – Risky – segfaults! – Maintenance burden – Contribution barrier

Skylight Agent – Started with Ruby – Too much overhead – Native extension! – But C…

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

Zero-cost abstractions™ – In Ruby: tension between abstractions and performance – Symbol#to_proc, Enumerable#map, etc – In Rust: no such tradeoff – Compiler is magic

fast_blank in Rust* * boilerplate not included

fast_blank in Helix

The vision – Keep writing the Ruby you love… – …without the fear of eventually hitting a wall – Start with Ruby – Move to Helix when appropriate

Last year – Good proof-of-concept – Too hard to use – Missing basic features

This year – Deploy to production – Polish, documentation – Features – Focus on Rails

Demo! – End-to-end example – Deploy to Heroku – It works!™

▶ http://chancancode.tv/helix

Good use cases – CPU-bound – Simple inputs – Avoid chatty APIs

Good use cases

Good use cases – Use Rust libraries – Leverage Rust web browser tech – Mailer, Background job, Action Cable

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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

usehelix.com