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Vinicius Stock
The state of Ruby tooling
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Vinicius Stock
Sta
ff
dev
Ruby DX team @ Shopify
X / GitHub: @vinistock
https://vinistock.com
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Is having options a good thing?
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Flexibility, freedom, autonomy
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Sources:
When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? - Sheena S. Iyengar, Mark R. Lepper 2000
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, Vol. 79, No. 6, 995-1006
• consider smaller portion of the available information
• simplify their decision making
• prefer the default option
• make no choice at all
When Choice is Demotivating: Can One
Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?
Complexity
Options
choice overload
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Today, I want to talk about options
in the context of developer experience
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Where is the Ruby community currently at
in terms of developer experience (DX)?
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It’s common to hear that tooling for Ruby is di
ff
i
cult
to make because it is too dynamic
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I don’t believe that’s the main source of di
ff
i
culty with
tooling
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The main challenge for a modern developer
fragmentation
experience in Ruby is
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Story of a new developer
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They want a complete developer experience while
trying Rust and Ruby
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How to
manage
Rust?
Rustup
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Tests?
Built-in
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Formatting?
Rustfmt
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Linting?
Clippy
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Language
server?
Rust
analyzer
And so on
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Rust’s well integrated experience didn’t
happen by accident
Source: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/dev-tools
Rust has a dedicated developer tooling team
Responsible for designing a cohesive
experience and coordinating e
ff
orts
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Modern default
tools + guidance
Consolidated
tooling
Easy integration
Minimal
decisions
Reduced learning
curve
Minimal
con
fi
guration
High
collaboration
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Direnv
RubyInstaller
Shadowenv
Mise
asdf
chruby
Frum
rbenv
rvm
Homebrew
How to
manage my
Ruby install?
ruby-install
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Tests?
Test Unit
Minitest RSpec Sus
Cucumber
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Types?
TypeProf
Steep RDL YARD
Sorbet
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Formatting
/linting?
Syntax
Tree
Standard Rubyfmt Rufo
RuboCop Reek
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Language
server?
TypeProf
Steep Ruby LSP Solargraph
Sorbet
RuboCop
LSP
Standard
LSP
Syntax
Tree LSP
Continues…
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Rust: 1 combination
Ruby: 13200 combinations
Considering:
• Full experience
• Single choice
• Lists not exhaustive
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No content
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No content
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Project A Project B
Open source
project C
asdf
No typing
RuboCop
RSpec
rbenv
Steep / RBS
Standard
Test Unit
Mise
Sorbet
Rubyfmt
Minitest
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Missing
defaults and
guidance
Dif
fi
cult
integration
Excessive
decisions for new
developers
Tooling
fragmentation
Too much
con
fi
guration
Spreading our
efforts
Steeper learning
curve
Community
driven tools
DX design is
delegated
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JavaScript is another fragmented ecosystem
Source: https://survey.stackover
fl
ow.co/2023/#technology-most-popular-technologies
But they have a much larger community
JavaScript: 63.61%
Rust: 13.05 %
Ruby: 6.23%
We can’t a
ff
ord to divide our e
ff
orts
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Contributors (not unique)
Sorbet + Steep + Solargraph + Ruby LSP +
TypeProf =
Rust Analyzer = 816
603
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Building new tools might make sense
More tools != Better experience
We need to consider the big picture of DX
DX is not about any one tool. It’s about the
combination of them
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Sources:
When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? - Sheena S. Iyengar, Mark R. Lepper 2000
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, Vol. 79, No. 6, 995-1006
• make no choice at all
When Choice is Demotivating: Can One
Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?
• consider smaller portion of the available information
• simplify their decision making
• prefer the default option
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• make no choice at all
Evaluating the alternatives requires too much e
ff
ort
Best case: having a worse developer experience
Worse case: deciding to not try Ruby
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• prefer the default option
Our defaults are so good they don’t have to
choose
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Using the tools is not the final goal
Tools are a stepping stone. The goal is to build
things
Setting up your development environment
should be e
ff
ortless
So that developers can fully focus on what they
want to build
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Tools as project dependencies
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In Ruby, it’s common to add tools as project
dependencies
But why?
# Gemfile
group :development do
gem “formatter”
gem “debug”
end
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Version consistency in the same project
But not much else
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Rust components
rustup component add rustfmt
clippy
rust-analyzer
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Tools installed globally
Version consistency in any project
Auto-updates
Global installation already in the PATH
Reduced maintenance
Tools can easily integrate with the
project’s dependencies
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Could we do the same?
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What can the future look like for tooling?
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Rust’s case is the exception
Fragmented
• Ruby
• Python
• JavaScript
• C / C++
• Java
• PHP
Consolidated
• Rust
• Go
1995
1991
1995
1970s / 1985
1996
1995
2015
2009
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Nothing stops us from learning from Rust’s
success
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There’s already a move towards consolidation
Prism is unifying all static analysis e
ff
orts
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Prism
Prism::Index
Code mods
Ruby LSP
Linter
Type checker
Formatter
RDoc
Deprecation
framework
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This is very long term, but we can achieve it
The challenges for a modern developer
experience are not technical
So what’s missing?
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• Is it coordination?
• Is it collaboration?
• Is it governance?
Do any of these look like a problem we
can’t solve?
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How to have a more integrated experience
right now?
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Language server protocol
But now we have language server
fragmentation
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Language
server 3
Code index
Language
server 2
Code index
Language
server 1
Code index
Extension host
Document 1 Document 1 Document 1
Open
document 1
Open
document 1
Open
document 1
Editor
Indexing…
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• Duplicate work
• Increased memory usage
• Each language server can potentially make
the other slower
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If we consolidate language servers, we can do
a better job at integrating the rest of the
ecosystem
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The Ruby LSP can help
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Ruby LSP addons
Source: https://github.com/Shopify/ruby-lsp/blob/main/ADDONS.md
A way for other gems to deliver integrations in
the editor
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Ruby LSP addons
• No need to write a VS Code/editor extension
• No need to write a brand new language server
Source: https://github.com/Shopify/ruby-lsp/blob/main/ADDONS.md
• No need to build your own static analysis tools
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Encoding helpers
Ruby LSP
Codebase index
Addon
Static tools
Response builders
Type resolver
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Language
server
Code index
Extension host
Document 1
Editor
Rails addon Test addon
Linter addon
Type checker
addon
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Ruby LSP addons
• Ruby LSP Rails https://github.com/Shopify/ruby-lsp-rails
• Ruby LSP RSpec https://github.com/st0012/ruby-lsp-rspec
• Internal integrations with RuboCop, Syntax Tree, Minitest and
Test Unit
Source: https://github.com/Shopify/ruby-lsp/blob/main/ADDONS.md
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The most important steps to advance Ruby
developer experience:
• Consider the big picture
• Coordinate our e
ff
orts
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Thank you