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by kyledrake 899 days ago
Indeed it's just the most performance-critical part of the stack that happens to involve ruby because I needed a shim between redis and powerdns. I write it as a quick hack years ago and have never had to make any changes to it.

I think that shim still uses ruby 2.6, I may try to upgrade it to 3.3 with yjit and see what the latency drop is, which is probably a more interesting number anyways, but again only really matters for a single caching request that only happens once in a while.

The real reason I continue to use ruby is because it's a quick way to get things done on business logic heavy web apps, but I continue to be impressed how much I can get away with using it for things it's really not known for being good at. I run into people often that refuse to use it for absolutely anything because there's a perception that it's "too slow", but when pressed I learn that they're not really working on anything that requires high performance provided by more esoteric languages with stricter memory management that is very likely nerfing their productivity unnecessarily. My goal here was to push back on that perception a bit, not to make the dns shim sound impressive.