Helix: Ruby Native Extensions Without Fear

Helix makes writing Ruby classes in Rust safe and fun. Find out how!

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
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