Welcome to another issue of the Newsletter!

April is already here, meaning we have passed the first third of the year. Time certainly flies.

In my recent blog post I tried to reflect on where Ruby is heading. It looks like it is far from dead, and with the current AI era, it may gain even more traction, potentially reaching the fame it had fifteen years ago.

While there are still debates on whether static typing is worth the investment in real-world code or just a toy, we have a great example of how it helps enforce high quality for the tools we use. The prism parser is now using rbs-inline internally. It is a fantastic showcase of static typing in an essential part of the ecosystem. In a similar vein, rbs_infer leverages prism to infer types directly from your Ruby codebase.

The tooling foundation keeps getting stronger. Shopify is actively working on rubydex, a high-performance static analysis toolkit for the Ruby language. Its goal is to serve as a solid foundation to power a variety of tools, such as type checkers, linters, and language servers. Soutaro, who takes care of RBS and rbs-inline, is actively contributing to the project, adding valuable RBS support.

Speaking of RBS, it reached the 4.0 milestone and recently received an update to 4.0.2. This major update now bundles rbs-inline directly with the rbs gem itself. This release brings necessary fixes and prepares the ground for the upcoming Ruby 4.1. The Rails ecosystem is catching up too, with a long-awaited update to rbs_rails bringing a massive amount of fixes and changes that help generate RBS classes for all the magic Rails provides.

If you rely on Steep for type checking, take a look at raap, which was recently updated to 2.0. It lets you automatically create test cases based on your RBS classes, enforcing tests to ensure that your code is not just type-checked, but also runs correctly. To keep Steep watching your back efficiently, sentinel-rb got an update to 0.3.4. It is a high-performance, Rust-powered watcher that keeps your dynamic Ruby code and static RBS type definitions in perfect sync.

It has been a while since the Ruby 4 release, and more tools in the static typing world are getting updates to support it. This month, both rubocop-on-rbs and rubocop-rbs_inline received necessary updates. Our constant newsletter guest, vscode-sorbetto, which forks the ruby-lsp extension for better UX, got several valuable improvements and fixes too.

If you read a lot of Ruby code with Sorbet signatures, the interesting new VS Code extension vscode-sigfade visually fades the signature syntax for better readability.

In the AI integration space, major stable releases are arriving. It is always a great moment when a library hits its first mature 1.0 release, and this is what happened with dspy.rb. This Ruby framework for programming language models is now fully production-ready. Following that, grape_sorbet got a big update bringing support for Grape 3+, while konstruo updated its seamless conversion of JSON into Ruby objects with field validation and type safety.

April brought many updates to the tools we rely on, with exciting experiments worth checking out.

Your faithful static typing guy ✍️

“Let's do TDD - type-driven development”

You can find all the previous issues of the newsletter in my archive.

I’d really appreciate any feedback that could help improve the newsletter. Feel free to share your thoughts using this form.

Cheers,

​Andrey Eremin​

c/o IP-Management #8826, Ludwig-Erhard-Str. 18, Hamburg, 20459
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