Aaron Patterson: Ractors, JIT Compilers, and Rewriting How Gems Install

In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Aaron Patterson, better known online as Tenderlove, a senior staff engineer on Shopify’s Ruby infrastructure team and a longtime contributor to both Ruby and Rails Core. Aaron and Robby chat about how Ractorsare finally bringing true multi-core parallelism to Ruby, the proposal Aaron has pitched to RubyGems.org for content addressable gems that could make bundle install dramatically faster, and the real reasons gems reach for native C extensions in the first place.

They also have a candid conversation about how Aaron actually uses AI day to day, from digging through unfamiliar code at Shopify's scale to building a JPEG encoder almost entirely with Claude, and why he still can't quite bring himself to trust it the way he trusts a longtime teammate.

Links

Tenderlove
Shopify
Ractors
RubyGems.org
FFI 

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On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails. 

On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.