The Missing Bundler Features | byroot’s blog

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about making Bundler faster, both by improving it directly, or by reimplementing it in another language, and while it may surprise some, that didn’t excite me much.Given how much I talk about performance on this blog, it might surprise you to hear I don’t care about Bundler performance. The reality is that I very rarely, if ever, have to wait for Bundler. Most of the time, all gems are already installed locally, so it completes instantly. A few times, a couple of gems are missing, and it completes in mere seconds, this is nowhere near a bottleneck in my workflow. It’s only once every few months, when I upgrade Ruby or checkout a new big project, that I have to wait a couple of minutes for the installation to complete, so it’s not like it’s driving me up the wall. Similarly, for CI and deploys, the gems installed by Bundler are heavily cached, so bundle install is very fast. And even if Bundler was magically able to install everything instantly without a cache, I’d argue that caching gems on CI would remain absolutely essential simply for resilience purposes.