Helix: Rust and Ruby, Without the Glue

Very excited to see the development of the Ruby&#x2F;Rust space. The two languages together would seem a joy of a workflow from concept through to maintenance, and the wealth of important Ruby personalities currently involved in Rust (as well as others) encourages that that this will be a well trodden and well documented workflow sooner rather than later.<p>I think this could help Ruby regain some of its early excitement, and remove the negativity of its &#x27;just a scripting language&#x27;, &#x27;only for rails, which is too slow for modern development anyway&#x27; image.

&gt; With Rails reaching version 5.0, there are plenty of APIs that are heavily used and extremely feature-stable. My goal with Helix is to eventually make it possible to reimplement a lot of these APIs as an native extension gem.<p>Sounds extremely exciting!

Great blog post.. First time I&#x27;ve been sold on Rust, sounds like it&#x27;s got some great features. Maybe I just had to hear about it from a Ruby dev. :)<p>Typos in the article: &quot;slimed down&quot;, &quot;you code could&quot;<p>Is &quot;needle_length = needle.length&quot; actually necessary? I thought repeated calls would be zero cost, but I&#x27;m guessing I&#x27;m wrong.

I would be interested to see how Ruby&#x27;s Set class performs in the Zesty example. If that is actually a bottleneck in the application, I would rather reach for something that is in the Standard Library instead of going fully native.

But the Rust version of the blank check doesn&#x27;t handle any encoding but UTF-8. Helix could wrap up a char iterator for it I suppose, one that calls rb_enc_codepoint_len?<p>And isn&#x27;t there some common C lib that exposes Unicode functions like is_whitespace? Granted, using a cargo crate is easier than finding and adding a .h, and far easier than getting and linking another lib.

So it is Rusted Rails? XD<p>Anyway I think the same could be applied to Ruby Core as well. As I have been calling a Rusted Ruby for a long time.<p>Though I am not sure if this is a good thing for other Ruby implementation like JRuby.

What are the dependencies for installing the gem? I assume the machine will need rustc&#x2F;cargo to compile the gem.

Helix is the name Perforce is using to rebrand their set of tools. Just an FYI, I&#x27;m not saying that means this should not be called Helix.

This is fucking cool. You have convinced me to pick up Rust.

Isnt a set containment problem a really simple problem to solve with a database, eg an inner join and a count?

May I say? PRAISE HELIX.

Rust has no its ecosystem, just pyramid selling. Swift will beat it!

I like Swift. Rust syntax make me headache.

Hmm. Kind of makes you wonder why you&#x27;re using Ruby at all, which is slow as hell. It appears that once they port all Rails libraries to Rust, it may not take that much effort to create Rust on Rails and get rid of Ruby.