Spinel - Ahead-of-Time Ruby Compiler

Ruby is expressive and loved. It's also, famously, not the fastest language around.

Spinel is Matz's answer to that. This ahead-of-time compiler that takes your Ruby code and compiles it all the way down to a native binary, with no Ruby runtime required. The benchmarks are hard to ignore: 11.6x faster on average.

In this talk we'll break down how it works, look at real Ruby-to-C examples to see what the compiler actually produces, and walk through a live benchmark of a CSV import pipeline running 3x faster with zero code changes.

We'll also be honest about the tradeoffs. Spinel isn't a drop-in for Rails, and there are real limitations worth understanding before you get excited.

If you write Ruby for data processing, CLI tools, or anything computationally intensive, this one's for you.

Join us in-person at Hashrocket or remote. Remote link will be posted the day of the meetup.