Kino: A high-performance Ractor web server for Ruby 4.0

(github.com)

55 points | by ksec 6 hours ago ago

11 comments

  • ksec 6 hours ago ago

    It will be interesting to see the Ruby Rails direction on ractor vs Fiber. Shopify is testing on Falcon / Fiber for production already.

    Edit: Turns out they are working on Ractor as well

    ( https://railsatscale.com/2026-08-11-ractors-on-rails/)

    • shevy-java 29 minutes ago ago

      Is it interesting? I think the whole debate of "Ractor versus Fiber" originates from the prior problem of ruby trying to overcome the GIL. Ractor is a more extensive solution here rather than Fibers.

      What shopify does or does not do, IMO, should not be of any concern. I'd rather like to have a ruby variant where shopify does not pull any strings. I think your assessment is incorrect here, though. There is not really a "Ractor versus Fiber". To me it is more a question of namespaces versus Ractor, since that has indirectly to do with per-process isolation (Ractor is kind of the attempt to do that for all of the thread/GIL, but personally I think Ractors should not even exist in the first place at all, since to me that is just a work around, even if that description is also not completely correct either; I also don't think Fibers should exist, everything should go back to threads+processes only. No need to make ruby any more complicated than it already is, when it comes to multiprocessors).

  • flossly an hour ago ago

    I've such fond memories of Ruby. Just moved to Kotlin since and it feels like a Ruby-with-types-and-Java-interop. Both Ruby and Kotlin are OO-first but FP-ready. Both are very expressive.

    Interesting enough the JVM is so much further ahead that my HTTP-server is implemented "in JVM" (the built in "Sun" HTTP server is good enough for production use in our case). Where as in Ruby land there was (and is) always a native HTTP-server in the dependencies of a production app.

  • baggy_trough 2 hours ago ago

    Excited to see the recent momentum for Ractor in Rails as well as base Ruby!

  • shevy-java 4 hours ago ago

    https://yaroslav.io/opensource/kino

    Where is the documentation?

    I am sorry but this is really a problem in the ruby world. Everyone sees how much ruby is struggling right now, yet key problems, such as documentation, are not a focus. Look at rack, ruby-wasm, ruby-opal and many other projects. Too many ruby developers hate documentation. There are a few exceptions (Jeremy Evans projects typically have a strong focus on documentation, for instance), but by and large I don't understand why documentation is always an afterthought of most projects.

    If you look at the github page at https://github.com/yaroslav/kino, and search for the keyword "documentation", you get zero results. I would instead have expected at the least a link with extensive documentation, both project-internally, but more importantly, via specific examples, a useful FAQ, and most importantly a kind of extensive "how to use this". Even ruby on rails, by the way, understood that this is important, and they have a tutorial (how useful that is, is another topic, but at the least rails people understand that documentation is important; see here: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html)

    Edit:

    They have on directory called doc/ here at:

    https://github.com/yaroslav/kino/tree/main/doc

    But have a look at this:

    "Almost all content here is written by agents (Claude Code or Codex)."

    When a project is too lazy to write documentation by a human, and instead resorts to AI slop spam, then why should real human use this? I don't get it. Is the ruby world nuts now? All that pointless AI slop spam? A lot of it is unreadable to me, it makes no sense. I am noticing this with Hiroshi Shibata, before he had difficulty with english, now he writes perfect english - aka AI slop. And the generated words STILL MAKE NO REAL SENSE. I read a lot of it and it is gibberish nonsense. It is like babelfish, only slightly improved. Mankind is actively getting dumber now.

    • digitaltrees 4 hours ago ago

      Ruby code is readable. So some of the documentation in say, Java, isn’t as necessary.

      • paulryanrogers 3 hours ago ago

        Debatable. I always found languages without parentheses inscrutable. To distinguish methods you have to have all method signatures memorized or rely on an advanced IDE with highlighting.

    • azuanrb 3 hours ago ago

      People love taking generic engineering problems and somehow spinning them as Ruby specific issues. None of the issues you mentioned have anything to do with Ruby. They’re problems you can run into in any engineering project.

  • Aldipower 4 hours ago ago

    High-performance and Ruby. An oxymoron. SCNR

    • digitaltrees 4 hours ago ago

      Not if the performance is joy and feature velocity.