RubyConf 2023 - Wrapping Rust in Ruby by Garen Torikian

Garen Torikian introduces the oxidize-rb project and demonstrates how to safely call high-performance Rust libraries from within Ruby applications.

Ruby is slow. Despite improvements over the years, the language will never be as fast as a compiled language. To compensate for this, whenever Ruby developers need to run performance critical code, it's not uncommon for them to interoperate with a library written in C. Dozens of well known gems, such as Nokogiri and Bcrypt, already do this. But with C comes other problems: how can we ensure that our low-level code is safe from memory leaks and other security vulnerabilities? In this talk, I'll introduce the oxidize-rb project, which is a suite of open source tools which makes it possible to call Rust libraries from within Ruby. I'll also demonstrate how simple it is to incorporate Rust code (including Cargo dependencies) into a Ruby gem.