alt Hacker NewsI'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.
It's at https://github.com/peterc/pure_jpeg .. and a lot of the recent speedups actually came from contributions by Ufuk/paracycle who, I'm guessing from your bio, you possibly work with? :-)
But yeah, I agree with your point about native extensions. Ruby has gotten so much faster in every form in the past couple of years that I think we could bring a lot more "in house". I think there have been some efforts with this regarding Psych in core as well?