At RubyKaigi I caught up with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, Koichi, and Aaron Patterson aka Tenderlove to talk about Ruby 3x3 and our path so far to reach that goal. We discussed Koichi’s guild proposal, Ruby 3 JIT (just-in-time compilation) and optional static typing, and the future of Ruby 3 performance.

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Jonan: Welcome everyone. Today we are doing an interview to talk about new features coming in Ruby 3. I am here with my coworkers from Heroku, Sasada Koichi and Yukihiro Matsumoto, along with Aaron Patterson from GitHub.

Jonan: So, last year at RubyKaigi you announced an initiative to speed up Ruby by...

Last week at RailsConf in Kansas City, Terence Lee and Richard Schneeman of Heroku’s Ruby Task Force sat down with the legendary Aaron Patterson (AKA tenderlove).

Aaron has been working hard to make Ruby three times faster — a goal that Matz called Ruby 3x3. Along the way, Aaron has discovered that Ruby may face a hard decision. On one side, Ruby can continue to be the productive, general-purpose scripting language that it looks like today. But the other side of Ruby is that it’s used to run long-running processes in Rails applications, pushing it to be more performant, strongly-typed, and memory-heavy. Ruby can't prioritize both.

To find out where Aaron thinks Ruby’s going, you can...