At RubyConf 2015 in San Antonio, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto announced Ruby 3x3. The goal of Ruby 3x3 is to make Ruby 3 be 3 times faster than Ruby 2. At AppFolio, we think this is awesome and want to help.

[Update: watch Matz's keynote ]

We have been using Ruby for the past nine years. Like most people, we initially came to Ruby via Rails. One of the main ideals of Rails was that developer happiness and productivity are more important than raw system performance. And Ruby supported that quite well. It's easy to write and easy to read. It follows the principle of least surprise. It's flexible and dynamic and perfect for DSLs. It even supports "seattle style".

But for all of Ruby’s virtues, it lacks speed. This isn't to say that performance hasn't improved over time: it has. But is Ruby fast yet? No. And today, the performance expectations are very different from those of nine years ago. Customers now expect more responsive web applications and APIs, developers expect a faster development environment (running rake, running tests, starting rails, asset compilation), and operations expects better utilization of cores and hardware resources. In other words, today we want developer happiness without sacrificing performance.

So, why hasn't Ruby been able to deliver better performance results? Jared Friedman argues that, in part, it's due to a lack of corporate sponsorship. In the case of PHP, it took Facebook to move it forward. In the case of JavaScript, it took Google to kick off the performance arms race. In the case of Ruby, Heroku has been sponsoring Matz, Koichi Sasada, and Nobuyoshi Nakada. That's great, but that's not enough. The development and maintenance of an entire programming language is a massive job. Performance optimization is a challenging problem, and it's only one of many important concerns in that effort. The Heroku three and the rest of the Ruby core team are going to need more support in order to satisfy today's performance expectations.

So, we at AppFolio would like to help. We have reached out to Matz and are proud to be part of the Ruby 3x3 effort.