unless you're a loser fash freak, it's really hard to find anything exciting and not majorly upsetting or depressing within the ruby ecosystem.
i mean, we got DHH, the guy whose claim to fame is having created the Ruby on Rails framework, running around openly calling for ethnic cleansing and promoting "remigration" (white supremacist bullshit), and then getting millions of dollars in funding for it.
the thing they're funding isn't even good! it's just (Evil) Baby's First Linux Rice held up by shell scripts that any single person could write better, because the chances of any human actually authoring these dogshit scripts is low. i say that because DHH, literally days ago as of posting, went on stage at RailsConf But With Blackjack and Hookers (Rails World) and said that he's just not writing code anymore. also his company's flagship product is abandoning rails for rust code that nobody is writing. lol. lmao.
that's all really shitty and hard to hear! and i'm not the right person to dissect all of that, so if you want to read something along those lines, click some of the links above. that's not what i'm here for. bottom line is that it feels like everything in the ruby world sucks shit and it kind of does.
not everything though. i'm still here, so i will find good things in the ruby ecosystem even if it kills me.
this is a short or medium length list because i don't have the energy to write long-form about each of these things, but please check them all out. they're awesome.
literally everything spinel.coop is doing right now is incredible
i don't care what you think about the RubyGems takeover; the shit that's come from it is epic.
spinel.coop came together in the midst of the takeover mess, formed by past maintainers of bundler and the like, and i love everything they've been doing. everyone who's mad about it can die mad because rv has singlehandedly made my experience in writing anything ruby way less miserable.
rv is written in rust, and it shows. my god this little program is fast. it's barely got meat on its bones, being so new, and it can already do so much! it's not nearly as powerful as bundler, but fuck, one of these makes me want to die when i try to decipher a weird issue with it and so far it's not rv.
it's so new that sometimes it crashes on me, but that's okay. i forgive it. also that's only happened like, twice. the rest of the time, it's installed ruby versions for me faster than i could blink.
a new gem server to replace RubyGems! fucking sweet!
gem.coop is like if RubyGems didn't suck shit and was something worth being excited about. replace that source line in your Gemfile right now, because gem.coop already has everything mirrored. they're also working on dependency cooldowns, which, when NPM is coughing up shai-hulud-infected phlegm all the time, is a good thing to hear.
like rv, gem.coop is seeing steady work and updates. be excited with me!!
rails but it's adorable and whimsical and not fascist. and better
i admittedly haven't tried these frameworks, but not because i don't want to; i just don't have the energy! but all of these frameworks make me very optimistic about a post-rails world.
hanakai is a little ecosystem of its own. what i know it best for is hanami, a web framework that is just as batteries included as rails, but not slow as shit, apparently. it matches the power of rails without any of the cruft + fascism. their website is super cute too, so extra points for that.
another one is bridgetown, which is a bit of a unique one: it's capable of both dynamic full-stack stuff and statically generated content. it feels like astro for ruby, which makes me happy because i love astro. i've honestly thought about using bridgetown to replace the hand-rolled crap rails CMS that this site currently runs on, but that's just an idea (for now).
technically i've tried mosscap, but that's because it's a hard fork of rails. i don't know all that much about the progress or viability of this project, but i have a lot of hope for it!
please support all of these projects
tell your friends about these projects! hell, if you're able, give them some money! and if you can't, that's okay because i can't give them money either. this post is here to remind everyone in the ruby world (and outside it) that ruby doesn't have to suck.
i have spent my short time as a rubyist hearing anecdotes— as in, i'm too lazy to find the sources, so trust me— that the ruby community in the 2000s-2010s was different. people there for it say it was special, that it was welcoming and playful; above all, it was kind.
DHH is being given millions of dollars just for running his mouth about ricing his desktop for the first time, while at once saying that he's de facto abandoning the project that brought him to prominence. most importantly, he is an irrevocably evil man trying to grow his platform further for the sake of spreading the vile ideology of his; ideology that he's proud enough to post on his company's domain. don't be naive; the linux stuff is a footnote. it's a foot in the door to normalize this rhetoric, to lobby for the mass killing of ethnic minorities and people of color.
don't let the fascists dominate the conversation. don't let them hijack the things you love. support your peers and friends alike; keep pushing back!