alt Hacker NewsTruffleRuby is very capable and deserves to be promoted more. I recently made a JPEG encoder/decoder in Ruby and it's 2-3x times quicker on Truffle. Native dependencies is where you can get caught out, but for pure Ruby, TruffleRuby is fantastic and worth including in your test matrix. (More broadly I think Ruby performance is reaching a point where we should be spinning up pure Ruby alternatives to native libraries, but that's a story for another day.)
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With truffle Ruby you don’t have to rewrite anything: Ruby code gets way faster and so does c code.
I'm surprised it's only 2-3x times quicker w/Truffle? Is that because it only encodes/decodes a single image at the time and incurs higher startup costs? Or do you mean 2-3x vs. an MRI alternative that calls into a native extension?
I'm curious whether this reflects MRI's improvements closing some of the gap or something else.
I'd imagine you don't want to look like you're self-promoting, but I'd really love to read more about the JPEG project. I think it could be quite good for the community. As a whole, I believe Rubyists need to stop reaching for native extensions so quickly. Whether on YJIT, ZJIT, JRuby, or TruffleRuby, all of them will benefit from having more code in Ruby. Incidentally, Chris's final conference talk¹ made the case for moving to a Ruby-based implementation for the Ruby core library.
For those cases where you're writing a native extension to primary bridge over to a native library, you may find either FFI or Fiddle handle your use case quite well.
¹ -- https://youtu.be/-iVh_8_J-Uo?si=8uVFLiF3NtjWgfR1