RailsConf 2017: ​Introducing Helix: High-Performance Ruby Made Easy by Godfrey Chan and Yehuda Katz

​Introducing Helix: High-Performance Ruby Made Easy by Godfrey Chan and Yehuda Katz

This is a sponsored talk by Skylight.

We got a good productivity boost by writing the original Skylight agent in Ruby, but over time, we couldn't implement all the desired features with its overhead. Ruby is fast enough... until it isn't.

Introducing Helix — an open-source toolkit for writing native Ruby extensions in Rust, extracted from our Featherweight Agent's DNA. Fast, reliable, productive — pick three. Come join us to find out how you can leverage this power in your Ruby apps and even help make Rails faster!

(This is not a re-run of Godfrey's talk from last year.)

[chris.dillon]

Neat. This actually seems easier than trying to do a C extension for a certain size problem. I'd probably do this even as I don't know Rust if it was small enough and I could hack something together in rust.