Ruby Outperforms C: Breaking the Catch-22 | Rails at Scale

Ruby is an expressive, and fun language to write. It helps us get our job done quickly by allowing us to easily get our thoughts written down as executable code. That said, sometimes the code we write doesn’t perform as well as we would like. In those circumstances, one common solution in both Ruby and Python has been to rewrite the slow code as C extensions (or more recently Rust extensions). This creates new problems, namely instead of having one code base, you now have two: a Ruby code base and a C/Rust code base. The C language comes equipped with many footguns as standard features, and as a library author now you must become familiar with them.