Jeff Dickey on Mise, Precompiled Rubies, and much more

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Welcome back

Everybody

Yes, you guys

Good

Yes

It's like 85 degrees Fahrenheit here

And I have to go to New York on Saturday

And I'm really upset about it

What is it in snowing?

Snowing

Yeah

Oh, I did see Casey Neissat's video

He was

You know, snowboarding through New York City at the stove

So, yeah

Why do you have to go to New York, Andrew?

Company retreat

Oh, one of those

You could retreat from the retreat

Yeah, well I like our company retreats

So I'm looking forward to it

That's fun

A ski trip in New York City

There you go

Well, why don't we dive in on this episode?

We've got special guests

Jeff Dickey or JD?

Welcome, we're super, super excited to have you

Thank you, it's good to be here

I think probably people will know you right now

From Meaze

The version manager for pretty much every language

And tool at this point

There's a handful of core supported things

But then the backlog of like every ASDF plugin

It supports too, which is kind of amazing

But if I remember right

You used to work at like Heroku

Did you work on the CLI there?

Yeah, yeah

I led an effort to rewrite it

Actually from Ruby into node

So it made sense at the time at least

How was that? How did that go?

And also was that kind of your start

Into building CLI tools

I feel like you're somebody

Who's pretty expert in that at this point

Reflecting on it now

It's actually because

Or more Ruby was a problem

Because that was the biggest issue we had with Ruby

It was distributing it

That we had to make sure that our end users had Ruby set up

And that it didn't conflict with their local installs

And that was a big reason for moving to node

It's because node did offer a single binary

And so it just made a lot easier to do distribution that way

But now

As we'll get to

Like I've already had a single binary for Ruby now

Yeah, yeah that's interesting

Because I remember like

I came from Python

And was trying to do like cross-platform stuff

And it was like

I was looking at easy ways to do that

And it was like yeah

Python is pre-installed on Ubuntu

So that's easy

MacOS had Ruby pre-installed

But it's like that version changes

Depending on operating system version

And so you can't always depend on

Those things

It always seemed hard to build a

Single binary for those languages

And there were

Many little projects for that

But I'm not entirely sure

What makes it hard to do that

I don't know if you have

Ideas on that

But that was something I always kind of surprised me

It was like why isn't it easy to just

Kind of build a single executable

Out of a Python

Program or a Ruby program

It's a lot to ask for end users

To maintain this development stack

For language that they may not even use

Or even if they do

That could be a problem too

Like we would have issues where

The users working on at the time

Would be like a Ruby 187 app

But like our CLI's

And support that

Because that would be the Ruby on path

And it's all explode in

Not good ways

So sometimes we get stuck on the single binary idea

But like that's one solution to the problem

You just want to sandbox your CLI's

Such that developers

It doesn't mess with their local setup

And they don't need to have anything pre-installed

Yeah and I guess that's where you need to mess with

The load path or whatever

So it's like don't use Ruby Gems

And it's default folders

Or whatever is like

You really need sort of control over those things

That way you can say

I'm going to only load my

Vendored copy of this library

You need those, that makes sense

Absolutely and it's a hard problem with development

Tools in particular because

Sometimes you do want

The Ruby on path

This is actually like a perennial problem with node

I guess Ruby has a t-wear

Like I don't know if you guys ever use Forman

Or it was like a pop-up

I think of the time that was a Ruby

Application but like because it's calling

Other Ruby applications

You sort of want a Ruby for Forman

But then the Ruby that Forman

Uses to call applications

You want to be the system

Or like whatever the user has configured at that time

It's a very hairy problem

For sure

And probably it's fair to say

I would argue that like in node and Ruby

They haven't quite figured it out

Python does

Because Python has the like

Python 3.9

Mineries right

This kind of sidesteps that at least as far as like

Miner version to go

I would say

That's funny

I haven't used Python in quite a while

So I don't think I've even looked into

Any of that stuff if that's more recent

Ish I guess?

39 you said

Sometimes you have to call Python 3

Yeah

I got into Ruby right at the time

That it was like Python 3 is out

But everything is only compatible with Python 2

So people didn't seem to want to adopt Python 3

And it got to be very confusing

For a few years there

Oh yeah

That was kind of the

Or something that they

I guess by putting

The major version in the executable

It kind of helps with selecting the right version

I guess

So they give you

Mineries that have just Python

Python 3

And then the minor version

So Python 3.9

So the nice thing is there is we have a Chabang

You can just put in the Chabang

Python 3.9

And then you know that that's going to be Python 3.9

Even it

There's a different Python 3 on path

I think I've seen this with Ruby

I don't know if they quit doing it

But I feel like back 10 years ago

I remember seeing like a Ruby 1.9 binary

Or something

And I think it never really caught on

Or something but I don't know what the story is there

This is pretty unique to Python

Because oftentimes it is just like

The minor version you need to have right

Right

You're not usually works pretty well

If they're following semantic version

The third digit there

Whatever doesn't really matter most of the time

You just want the latest version of it usually

And it's like who cares

It's probably not going to break anything

Yeah that's interesting

Because I don't think I've really ever seen that

In Ruby

And I thought maybe that the Python 2

And Python 3 thing was like

A

Debian package thing

Or something that they did

Because like if you install PostgreSQL

18 or 17 or whatever

They have

Separate package names

And you can run them side by side and stuff

Yeah I don't know if that stems out of

The like Linux packaging

World or something and that came on

As an idea because Python's

You know so heavily used

Ubuntu applications

And core stuff there

Maybe it was out of that or something

It's very likely

Yeah

So you know over the years

Like I learned

Where did I even start probably

Learning Ruby installed

RVM I would imagine

And then

CH Ruby and RBM came out

And I started using those

And then eventually of course

Now you use Webpacker

And you need a node install as well

Which leads you to like using

NVM and then at some point

ASDF comes out

It's like oh why don't we just have one tool

That does this

And that was all written in batch

And I've used that for

A fair bit of time

But there were really nice things

That like RBM had

Environment variable management

Built in or as a plugin

You could add really easily

But I asked them

And the ASDF project

Is that ever

Something they want to do

And they pretty much said no

And I was a bit bummed by that

So I hacked my own

Little plug in there

It was batch, it was easy to add a line

To go run another script to load

Environment variables

But I feel like what you've done with me

Is awesome

From the Tomlconfig

Like there's just so many

You can run a script I believe too

Like you can just do almost anything

You could ever imagine with it

And I feel like there's some

Maybe it's your

Heroku experience and stuff

Since then

But like I feel like you have a really really good understanding

Of like I need this tool

To be very flexible

And we have a few different options for everything

And it seems extremely well thought out

So I was curious

Where did

You stumble on

I should probably go build this

And how did me as get started

How do you think about designing it

It just felt like it had a level of polish

Nothing else that I had used

Quite had at least for something

Is broad as

Every language version manager

So I've been in kind of the

Devin for

Sort of world for a long time now

I started in like

2014 with Heroku

And so like

Getting runtime setup

On machines

Whether it's in CIO or local

Has just been something i've been doing for a very very long time

And I was working at AWS

And was working on some of their

CIO infrastructure

And basically the base docker image

And it was using ASTF

And we just had this design restriction

The way we wanted to work

It gets right back into the minor version thing

Where we didn't want to pin

The patch version of the runtimes

Supples that

We wanted to leave that loose because we wanted

Application developers just always be on the latest

You should always be on the latest

3, 4, whatever provey

And we don't want to have uses

Get a PR and have to

Like stamp that or something

So like that was a design requirement

And ASTF was dead fastly opposed to this

They thought that

And so i think like

Means it really started from the beginning

I thought that it needed to be

Sort of maximalist in terms of

What

Workflows it should support

So like with shims versus path

I think it's the first version manager

I'm aware of that does both

Usually it'll be one of the other

But they both have pros and cons

And so i just do both

And i think that does work very well

Users complain about behavior in one way

The other way

There's no perfect world you can't solve

All the problems with both of them

And

Likewise when it comes to how

Developers want to specify the version

Like if you want Ruby 3, if you want Ruby 3, 4, if you want Ruby 3, 4, 2

It's up to you

And so i think that's done well for the project

It's needed to grow quite a bit

Didn't a lot of work to support

All these use cases but

I think especially when it came to dev tools

It was really long enough that i had pretty good

What the scope needed to be

To kind of cover all its bases

And through some iterations, through a few years

I think we got there

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I forget what i was doing originally

But that was absolutely

What i ran into with ASDF

I really just want to specify

Ruby 3, 4

I really just want to specify

Ruby 3, 4

Or even just Ruby 3 in general sometimes

Because i want the bug fixes

And the security fixes automatically

And sometimes i don't care about the minor version

Because none of my code there is tied to a specific thing

But i remember ASDF being very strict about that

And except for like there was a cool thing

Of i think the node plugin maybe

Had the aliases for LTS

Or whatever and i was like oh that's nice

There were some warts with that

Or whatever too

And i ran into something with that

And i don't remember what it was exactly

But it was like coming to me

It's just like oh you've just kind of just

Address all of these inconsistencies

Between how node versions are managed

And Ruby wines and other languages and stuff

And that felt really refreshing

Because it was like

Just a little bit of chaos

When you're trying to use all these different tools

And ASDF has so many plugins that aren't necessarily maintained

By the author of ASDF itself

So everybody has their own weird little things

And i felt like yeah you did make that really consistent

And the path thing was really awesome

Because the shims

I guess are beneficial in cases where like

You have a system d process that needs an actual

Executable path like a full path

And can't be evaluated dynamically or whatever

But is that also the path thing

Something that makes it faster to

I guess mes is also not written in bash

Because the ASDF i've noticed

Got pretty darn slow for me at some point

But mes is also not written in bash

And super fast for managing versions and stuff

So i'm curious about that

Like for one

Explain to people the difference between the shims and the path setup

And then your architecture behind the scenes of

Is written in rust right?

Yeah, yeah, certain in rust

To be fair to ASDF

Which has now since been rewritten and go

But had they would have stuck with bash

They would not have been able to do

The version prefix stuff

That uses above

And wanted not well

It would have impacted performance

Which is already poor with bash

So much that it wouldn't have been worth doing

It would have required a rewrite

I think

So shims and paths

So

Version manners have largely two main methods

That they use to

Let's say when you type in bundle install

What version of Ruby that's using under the hood

And so the most common way is with shims

And so

A shim is

Sometimes a little bash script

In the me's case it's actually a simlink to me's

But because the

Simlink isn't named m-i-s-e

It knows it's a shim and it so it works

Nice

It basically launches me's every time

And it does like the version

Okay

Try to find the me's tom or the tool version

Whatever the configuration is

Figure out what version it should actually use

And probably that

And then the

Barbarable method

Or the path version

I don't think it was a good name in the cap slate

But basically what you do is

Well to the user what they think it is

It's like when I cd into a directory

It wires up my runtimes

That's actually the bad way to do it

The way that me's does it and the way all good tools do

Is it reloads every single time the prompt is displayed

And the reason for that is

There are times when you want it to refresh

When you didn't change the directory

Such as if you edit the me's tom right

Or if you type in me's use the command to change

Say the Ruby version right

Then like you want that to take effect immediately

You don't want to have to cd out

And in would be it right

So the performance cost just depends

If you call a shim

In a loop in a bash script

Then you pay that penalty for me's to load

Which is pretty light

About 10 milliseconds

It sort of depends on your configuration or machine

10-15 probably

Or do you want to pay it every time your prompt is displayed

Which means does some short circling there

To sort of be able to tell like

Okay there's like a fast path that I think can run in 4 milliseconds

If it can detect that probably nothing changed

So you know it just kind of depends

But really I think that both of these are bad

Because the environment variable method

That only works in interactive prompt

When the prompt is displayed

Right if you have a script

And you do cd inside of that script

It doesn't necessarily work

Me's is doing some tricky stuff

And it's hooking into like

CHPWD and ZSH

So it will try to do the best it can

Depending on the support of the shell

I can't even remember all the ins and outs of top my head

But I think we can do it

In the three big ones

Fish

But that can sometimes be downside

Shims tend to be more reliable

That is often what I suggest people use with like Docker for example

Because it's just sort of doing that resolving every time

And the biggest downside I think with shims is

For me it's just which the shell command which

What's points to the shim

Which is usually not what you want

I like when I say which

I get the real binary that I'm about to call

It makes diagnosing problems a lot easier

Probably we're still better with lm's right

Because that's what they're going to do too

And the more like

Oh okay I got a shim now I'm going to do

Me's which node

Right as an interaction

Right

Tasks are the solution to

The whole thing though because then you don't need to do anything

Okay explain those

Because I remember Andrew telling me about

Tasks

And I don't think I

Quite wrapped my head around him

We use them kind of extensively

And I also love the fact that I can use

Me's X in those tasks

To just make sure everything's better

And the shabang

Like being able to use me's in your shabang

Is even nicer so yeah I'm a big fan of the task system

Yeah yeah so

Another problem with the environmental stuff

Is it requires users to put the ZSHRC in big

Into their shell

Which sounds easy enough but if you've got a big company

And you need to roll this out

You might want to do other configurations

When you get more advanced in these things like

Me's M, you might want to set

No things like that but then you really get to point

Like the ZSHRC needs to be just so for it to work

And figuring it out

It could be trickery especially in your developers

Most of us don't want to think about path and all this stuff

And so like

I've done the best I can around that

But there's some inevitable things there

And the modifies the ZSHRC in the first place

It is a little bit of a headache

So task is

This thing is a fast script

It literally is a fast script

You can call it as a fast script

It works like that

It just has some special comments that decorate it

To add a description

And to take an argument

Help stuff like that

It just sort of lets you build

Some structure around fast scripts

And when you call one of those

All that stuff will be wired in

As if you were running a shim

Or Misex

Or had the shell extension in your ZSHRC

But I think the advantage is that it's very reliable

The way one user runs a task is going to be pretty much the same as another user

In my opinion it's the dream of something like dev containers

But with something that is not nearly as heavyweight to use

Okay

That sounds really useful

I'm going to have to start

Checking that out after we finish this

I know Andrew you had some questions

Like rust versus go

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I was wondering because I did a little peruse

Do you get my bad?

Didn't want to peek in on everything there

But I see that you're pre-prolific rust developer

And go has been getting more and more popular

For kind of developer tooling

So I was wondering why you chose rust

But it could just be preference

So I despise go

And not because of anything

Bad about the language

I use it work and it's fine

It is soulless

I've never enjoyed programming less

Than when I'm writing go

You're not able to build interfaces

Like the way one developer writes go

What's the same as another developer

And there's no fun

And choice me of the wall

I can't stand it

There you go

Just for that reason alone

I think early in the days

Before I wrote memes I didn't know rust

I tried to learn it

And wasn't able to

Obviously this is pre-LLM

Rights would be different now

It wouldn't have to actually know

But at the time certainly I needed to outrate rust

I tried to learn it before

And I gave up I couldn't figure it out

And came back to a couple years later

And it kind of settled with me

Whereas I could write go just fine

But I did benchmark it

And actually for the shell extension thing

And I can't remember what those benchmarks said

But it definitely gave rust the edge

For sure

I don't know if there's another language

Maybe Zig could be even faster still

Don't know

Right

I think rust is fast enough

Don't often hear complaints about the performance

Well keep an eye out for the assembly branch at some point

Yeah

Get an LLM to rewrite it at some point

Yeah

Extensely just about me's

But you have a lot of other really great project

You want to talk about FNOX?

Yeah

FNOX or FortNOX

So

Secrets was a long standing feature request for me's

Don't understandably so

It does environment variables

People don't really like putting plain text environment variables in

And so there was this experimental stuff

I'd worked on for a while to

Use something like SOPS to feel familiar with that

Which is

Basically a way that you can have a Jason file

For

Can be for environment variables this is often used for

But it could just be any

Jason or Emel or Tommel file

But it gives you a way to encrypt it

And then commit that encrypted

Into your code base

And then you can use something like AGE

Or an Amazon KMSK or

Some decryption

Due to crypt it

Which I think is a fantastic way to handle secrets

Right

You're out with some there and then we're all screwed anyways

But

So that was kind of the model that I had been using

And what people really wanted

For secrets was one password

That was what people wanted

But these can't really do that

It can't make a network call

Every time you run a task

It's too much

It's way too much

It's going to be slow

You're going to get rate limits

It would be awful, awful experience

I don't put your secrets in some cache on disk

That's what you're trying to avoid

So originally I just

Did it because I needed to be a separate CLI

So that like

It doesn't have to refresh that environment all the time

And just by virtue of not being part of me

And being this other thing

It can just refresh when

It works in a lot of the way the same as me

But has an FNOX.Tommel

Where you can either have encrypted

Environment variables

Or you can have

Remote ones like one password

Or it was on secret manager

Or things like that

It's a lot like me

Where it's like I want to give choice

I think the encrypted way is the way to go

Because it's just faster

But if you really want to use one password

Which people do because it's super convenient

And with that options there

I wouldn't say it was totally nailed

The caching thing

Still kind of noodling on it

Still less to load everything

It's not better

But I have some ideas

But we'll see what I can come up with there

But that's basically this is fast secrets

In your environment when you go into projects

I think encryption is the way to go too

I mean sometimes we'll use like the OP

One password CLI to grab things

From our shared password vault

But we also have like

Our own kind of encryption system going on

And my CTO

Wanted me to specifically ask you about this

Because I think that's something that we're definitely like

Okay this could really solve

We could really consolidate a lot of stuff

If we use this

I've actually been seeing it this week

Like there's this workflow of like

I got stuff in one password but I want to get it into my repo encrypted

I think that's a workflow that should be more native

It isn't right now

But it wouldn't take that much work

Yeah

So I think there should be something there where

It is kind of a cache

Maybe a manual and we have to like run

And then that would pull things out from one password

Put it in encrypted

You know I also think like some of the stuff around like

Augade could be a little bit better

Managing the lifecycle around that

A lot of that is kind of left up to the user to figure out

How do you manage the public keys and stuff

I could probably do more there

No I like the sync idea

Because I wouldn't have any problem doing that

How often is your password well

Your password should be changing

More often than it probably is

And likely is probably not

So if it does change

It's having to run sync and then it's there

I'm good to go

I mean you could run it on the scheduled GitHub action workflow

Right

Yeah I'm a big fan of those

Next thing I wanted to ask you about

Unless you have anything else you want to say about FNOX was Pitchwork

Pitchwork I'm excited about

So Pitchwork is a demon runner

And I guess it sort of competes with like system D in a way

But it's really more for developers

You could run like long running

Demons out this

I'll tell you that the use case that I find annoying

Is I go from project to project

I see the end and like I want to run the doc server

Or the application server or anything

And like I always forget oh I got to run it

And even with LLM it's like kind of a pain

Prompted to start and like

I don't really like running LLM

The demons inside LLM

I don't know

I have a tab open where you run

NPM run server or whatever

But like

Rail server probably for all your listeners

But I don't know

I kind of hate managing that other thing

Sometimes I forget that it's there and I try to run it again

It's like oh that's really running that port

I'm running two different things on different ports

So that was the problem that I've always had

So I just wanted to be like I cd into a directory

It starts up the servers

In that for that project

So they're just there

If you leave that directory then they go away

I'm kind of an automatic way where like if I have

Five terminals in one obviously it's not going to run five of them

That's kind of the idea is that

It's this automatic demon runner for development services

And it's coming along

You know it started probably a year ago

Kind of got it to an experimental state where it was working

I gave it another pass a couple months ago

And really kind of spruced it up

To what I think is a good one.0

And seems to be humming along

I haven't been seeing a lot of bug reports

It's I'm happy about

Because trying to diagnose what's wrong

With the thing running demons is a lot trickier than

Something you're just like calling as a CLI

Seems like it's going pretty well for people

Another thing I've really need to

Is like you know I show like all of you

I use Docker a lot

You can't run this system D in Docker

Or at least you're not supposed to

So like I've done this where you have to

Post is like using system data like

Launched and it's clunky

Pitchfork is just a rust CLI

So it doesn't need any special system stuff

It can just run demons anywhere

There's also like

You know it's similar to

Supervisor D I think

It's kind of an older tool around this

In some ways you can just think of that

But with Tommel

Yeah I think that's pretty cool

Last library I wanted to talk about

Was usage because I think that's

Really freaking cool

Yeah usage

We'll see I'm actually a little

Negative on the future there

Because of LLM so usage is my

CLI is like swagger for CLIs

And you can generate documentation from

CLIs but what people

Really like it for is completions

And that powers

Meas has very complicated completions

So where you can mount like

It gets into the tasks stuff right

So if you do Meas run the way you run a task

And hit tab you can complete crazy things

It's pretty easy to configure

Because it's all built on this usage

Thing that I wrote this spec

And it makes it pretty easy to decorate

So like let's say you had

A Meas task to like list users using an API

It takes like a couple lines of code

You just like define the completion

In that Meas task and say curl this thing

And like you just have to

And separate it things right

The reason I say I'm not sure

It's just I think with

Agents don't use these

They have other ways of getting this information

And so I think like

The days of us actually getting tab

The terminal might be behind us

But it works really well for me

Because I have a lot of CLIs

I use usage and all of them

That if nothing else

It makes it so I can have consistent docs

Consistents, man pages, consistent everything

Across all my stuff

And I have been using Rust for everything

But if I ever wanted to do another language

Signastic to that

Which is quite cool

I'm a big terminal

And what you said about us

Not using the terminal much longer

Maybe freaking die inside a little bit

But not the terminal

No completion

The completions right

But I was like oh my god

Because completions have always been tricky

You know you got to have this here

And that there and you got to

You know make sure the brew

Sight Z functions are in or whatever

And I was like this is so nice to be

Just like use these kind of magic comments

Because this is a workflow I'm very familiar with

These documentation comments to the top of the file

I also feel like it makes it easier

For the LLM to use as well

And then it makes it easier for me to use

Right? And then I also like

That you can dump it out to mark down

That's big fan of that too

Where it has a strong future

Another thing about LLM is

I can make the integrations

That's been on my list

Is like for all the different

CLI frameworks

For all the different languages out there

It would be great if

They had some usage plugin for that

So you can export it

Those are super easy for me right now

Yeah nice

Are there any other projects that you're working on

Are you excited about?

I can't forget it

All right let's go

Yeah I was going to say

Ruby ever since I've ever

Even until recently

There's just not been any pre-compiled versions

It feels like

So I run a little hosting platform

Called Hatchbox

People will spend up a $5 server

But if their first deployment

Is compiling Ruby

That will take 15-20 minutes

So I was like why don't I just go

Pre-compile Ruby

And just go back through

And wrote a script to go

Ever since I think

Up to like two six

Or two seven

We just compiled the latest version of those

And then

Newer Ruby three

Or something we do like every version

So we just have like

Our archive of those

But the thing I discovered

Knowing a whole lot about like what actually happens

When you're compiling Ruby

You know in the past you've needed

Liberied line and the

Version of that you get

Liberied line three

Or four and different package versions

Different Ubuntu versions

End up with different names and whatever

But then you also run into the issue of like

There's a prefix directory

That gets hard coded as like

This is where Ruby is going to live

And

I

Didn't know anything about that really

Until I moved it and realized

It's just looking for that old directory

All the time

But then I guess

Homebrew and

Mike McQuade had

Built a portable version of

Ruby to run on macOS

And I guess maybe on Linux now too

With homebrew on Linux

And that's kind of the foundation

Of what you

Wanting for me is now

With the precompiled rubies right

Yeah

So i think this story starts for me

Back a little ways with python

Because python had the same problem

Same exact problem

And

Us and

Astral the ub guys

Both just for our users

Wanted faster pythons

And so there was a guy

Name escaping right now

Working on portable python

As a site project kind of thing

And had some success with it

And astral took it over

And spear had the development of it

And for me as i picked up

About the same time

I wasn't sure if that was something

Just wanted because it was kind of breaking change

Like these vineyards are not as compatible

But they're so fast

And so i left as a boat

What do you guys want?

You know this is a lot earlier than me these days

We compiled and so we went with that

And i'm so glad we did

Because it's so much smoother

To use python and change versions

Everything

So naturally with ruby it was the same story right

It takes minutes to compile these stupid things

And very frustrating

Especially if you do use patch versions

You get to have three four one three four two four three four

You know just uh it's terrible

So yeah home brew had a portable ruby project

But it was very like purpose built for home brew

It wasn't a general purpose thing

And they it's explicitly called out that that's not

The goal of the project

Not what they were working on

And then Andre Arco he picked it up

And he had done somewhere for his RV project

I think that

I just I want to win this thing

Like i want to win it myself

Just the supply chain security stuff

Is like something really sensitive too

I got hundreds of thousands of users

And like i feel

Responsibility that if i'm compiling stuff

It's secure

You know i like to trust as few people as possible

And so i was like oh i'm just going to take this on

And see how much work it is

Like finish this out

And like try to get it into me and see what happens

But forget when

I want to say maybe like November

December i added it

Into me is like an experimental thing

Hats people try it

They ran into some bugs

There's like something weird with SSL

You can see things

You know smattering things

Really take a lot more effort from where it was

But i guess it must have been about

Two or three weeks ago

Like DHH made a mention of it on twitter

Yeah

And frankly i kind of forgot about

I was kind of letting it just sit there

Like people tested out

But then i was like you know

It's been a while since i've heard about any real problems here

Let's pick a date

Everybody switched over

So i think that's going to be August 1

But i think it does like show it warning right now

That this is going to happen

And so you can opt in now

To get the port of ones

And actually kind of through all that

A lot more people tried it

I think they found another bug or two

I imagine there may be another

Couple hidden in there somewhere that will uncover

But it seems to be going pretty smoothly

Which i'm pretty happy about

So we'll see what it's like when i flip the switch

But obviously these are not

Me's minaries

They're there for RBM

RBM

I hope everybody uses them just like

What happened with Python

But i don't actually know why

Like Ruby doesn't just do this but

Whatever reason

Or Python for that matter

But it's so good for the ecosystem

It makes a huge difference

You know it's not just the time

It's like all the app gets stuff

Things people have to do to app getting install stuff

Or like they need to home brew

And they need to...

Users hate that

And they're not going to use your language because of that

It's just the way it is

Yeah, it's been a long frustration of mine too

And part because i get the complaints

But i'm hoping that will be no more

Come this summer

That makes a lot of sense

And that was one of...

You answered one of the questions i was going to ask

Was like you know i knew Andre

And i was curious you know i saw that

Your repo is a fork of

That i believe

Yeah

And that i understand most

I understand more work than i have

I've done very little but there's just

A couple things to...

It makes sense though if you're the one installing it

Then you should be responsible for

That and

You're going to be the ones getting the complaints

If something is wrong or whatever

So it makes a lot of sense that you want to own it

And so you can fix the things and

And truly understand what's going on there

And whatever

With Python i'm happy to let astral on it

But there's no

Equivalent to that here

Yeah no right

Yeah because i don't know i think there may be

Some talk or whatever of

There may eventually be

Something like that happening in

Ruby officially

That would be awesome

And then these efforts could hopefully be

Combined or whatever but

Yes

I remember i used to go to

RBMs wiki

And look for

If you're compiling on Ubuntu or Debian

Grab this giant long list of packages to install

Before you compile Ruby

And it was like

All these tools you don't really know what they are

And you're just like

I just want to use Ruby

So i blindly install

Or whatever

And then over time too

Ruby

Removes like the need for

Libreedline

There's a pure Ruby version of it

And so like

More recently the required sort of dependencies

For compiling Ruby is very small

Less thankfully compared to what it used to be

And that was one of the things

I spent some time trying to figure out

With i rewrote the new

Rails getting started guide

Rather than the old guide

Which just said install Ruby

And once it's installed

You can gem install Rails

I was like we need to

Help people install Ruby

So i ended up adding the install

Ruby guide there

Which uses me

But it has some of those

Install these packages on macOS

Or linux

Or if you're on windows you should use

WSL and more or less

Instructions and

It still felt like

The sucks as a

Someone who wants to jump into

Rails they don't care about

The internals of Ruby or any of that

They just want to use Rails

And even having

A version manager is a little bit of

A annoyance as well

But it makes it so nice

Because when you want to switch to the new version

Now you'll just be able to say

You know Ruby 4.0

Or 4.1 or whatever

And it'll just be like

Oh cool that's why we have that

And that makes sense

But with the whole compilation steps

It was just like no wonder

That our community doesn't have many

Juniors and they're going to node

Because it's so much easier to get started

So i'm super excited about that

I'm going to have to make a pull request

When the pre-compiled

Ruby's go live because that will be

An even shorter install guide

Or maybe that can go away entirely

But

Some of those dependencies

Like open SSL or whatever

Need some tweaks

To be able to be fully portable

I was just curious what goes into that

Because I think most of us use Ruby

And we've just run the same steps

To compile it but we never really

Understood what's going on here

What's configurable

I know you can install like

GMP and that makes big decimal

More efficient or something

And like we just don't know

We use Ruby, we don't work on Ruby itself

So I was just curious to hear your expertise

On what happens there

There is some base level of support

That Ruby has been working on

I don't know how far back this goes

But there is a flag that you can use

On compiling it

And that kind of gets you started

Don't know exactly what that is

But I would assume it's going to bake things in

It's not going to rely on shared objects being there

It's going to try to

Bake as much in as it can

And

Beyond that, it's just a lot of little things

It's like, for example

One of the things I fixed was

Open SSL out of the box

I guess doesn't look at the SSL cert file

Environment variable

To like look up where its certs are

Like a patch open SSL

In the stuff to get it to do that

But now that work seems to work great

And it's a lesson with like native gems and stuff

And also like native gems come with header files for the C code

And so like I had

Can't remember exactly what I do

But I do something to like

Get that to work correctly

So when you do at the end of the day

You do gem install with one of these

It works

And when you install one that

Luckily for most of the big gems that

Are like no kugiri

These days they come pre compiled

And we just download the correct version right from Ruby gem

So we don't even at least I don't

Most cases have to compile gems

It feels like

Which is nice

That makes sense that that's kind of a compatibility thing

To make sure that

Those are finding the right directories

Or whatever because they're going to be

Potentially moved

Do you have to do any testing of that

Compile Ruby in one place

And then move it to another folder

And make sure that it still runs

I don't know if I have to test that specific use case

I think by and large I just assume it works

Because it would fail

It's not the else it would fail when I try to use it to me

And it doesn't

Oh right yeah

And like because this is a fork project from homebrews

Like they were already having to deal with that

And obviously a wildly different path

And whatever it gets built on

And get out of actions

But I do like add definitely like use cases

There's like test scenarios for like

Chewing gem and souls and stuff

It's been a lot of that

I feel like it's been actually the gem install part

And less of like the Ruby binary itself having issues

Yeah actually I don't think there's anything I've done

With Ruby

It's been open SSL and the gem

It's all the extras

It's probably who knows when like

Ruby three or three one

Or something when they took that a bit more

Seriously and added that flag

You were talking about to make those

Things dynamic or whatever

Or bundled into the executable

Or whatever

Because that I'm sure you can't just go back to

Ruby 187

And maybe you could

But it would probably be a lot of work

And I think

I believe that fusion passenger

Team at one point had like

Built portable Ruby

187 or 193

And like some really old project

That

Since been very abandoned

But it seemed like it was a ton of work back in the day

Yeah it seems like a few people have taken this torch

And it's like traveling Ruby

It's a great clever name

Yeah that's the name of it

I think there was another one in the middle here too

That maybe less version or two

But we'll see

Yeah, you know if nothing else

I hope that like having it in me

And having that be part of the standard rails and saw

Like at least now there's a place

If something is over my head

At least like there's a central place

That we're doing this for a lot of people

So that hopefully

We'll accelerate adoption too

Where it's like

The rails community now is sort of

Put a

Flag in the sand that says like

Rather than

You go to the Ruby install page

And it's like here's 100 version managers you could use

And there's obviously like

They don't want to have a preference

Or whatever they want to kind of be agnostic there

But it's like at some point

It's helpful if you do

So that people can rally around

Polishing one solution

And then that continues to improve

And just get really good over time

As opposed to lots of little

Just to acknowledge might have made

One thing better there

But never gets pulled into other projects

That makes it just a bit trickier over time

You think

There'll be any challenges

To maintaining that going forward

Or will it just kind of hopefully be

I guess automated

And maybe you don't ever have to recompile

Like the oldest rubies

All you have to do is the new ones

Is they come out

Unless maybe there's some like

Open SSL or something that you discover

And you've got to go back

And maybe recompile every one of them

To correct it

But what do you think in there

Maintenance?

So I've been working on this now for about three months

Four months maybe

And it's been pretty minimal

Like of all the projects I work on

This is not taking up a lot of effort

There's no open bug I'm aware of right now

Which is great

But yeah, when I do find something

It usually is across all versions

I forget how far back I go I want to say three two

I think three two is what

There's a version like three three oh that

It's not building

Yeah, there's a couple odd ones like that

That you can't even compile it yourself from scratch

Or whatever

Or bug in the release or whatever

I have a couple of those where I skip them too

Yeah

So if that comes up, I'll rebuild them again

I am doing maybe one things like we're mentioning

It's like

The way I version these is a little in orthodox

Where

You can't access my old builds

So I'm using like the

GitHub releases like three three zero

There's no build revision there

And that's kind of just to make my life easier with me

Because

Meas doesn't have a concept of build revisions

I don't really want to add that

Like ultimately this hurts the easier

And I don't think you care right

Like if you're using pre-compiled binder

You're already not very sensitive to how the sausage was made

Downside is here as like

Shaws will change if I do have to rebuild

So it's not perfect

But we'll see how it goes

I may regret this decision

But I think the nice thing is

You can just like go to that

GitHub release your L if you're using outside of me

And like that's the latest version

Right?

Copy it yourself and do whatever you want

If you want some particular

Vintage of how I compiled these

And some particular date

You know

Yeah that makes sense

And like if I did discover a bug

It's like

You'll fix it

I'll just delete my local install of that version

And then install the new version

And it was just

Download the new executable

And boom

Again I may regret this but that's what works right now

Yeah

Yeah and it's subject to change or whatever

If it becomes a problem or something then sure

But yeah

Don't need to address it yet

I'm just super excited

For this because it seems like one of the

I just wish we had this 12-15 years ago

It feels like something that just

Should have been solved many many moons ago

But at least it's being solved now

So you have to

If I remember right you have to run a

Command to set a flag to enable this

Yeah

So we should record but that's really it

And then the next install you do

Of one of those

Supported versions

Will try to download that right

Yeah exactly

So yeah anybody who's listening

That wants to try it

There's a specific version of me is the ads that

Functionality they just might have to

Self update or something

It'd be good to be on the latest

Yeah yeah

So in the docs that will be there

And easy to run

I already switched over my

Desktop and laptop

To using the pre-compiled ones

And I'm generally just using

For Ruby 4.0

So everything's been working perfectly fine

You wouldn't notice other than like

That installed

Occurally fast

Because usually I'm used to the

All right install go grab a drink

Or use the restroom or something

Come back and have some wait time in there

But now it's just like

Whoa this is awesome

And it's i don't know

Something we've needed forever

So I appreciate

You like taking the responsibility

To like let's make sure this moves forward

It's awesome and same

With the spin-all team working on our

V like they did a big step

In this as well

I'm curious because doesn't

For me is work

Use UV

Underneath for python

Or do you have your own version

Management

Use UV for python dependencies

So if you wanted to like

Pipex

So there's a pipex

Backend so you can just install

Arbitrary python packages

That is a bad name

We might probably change that name soon

To pypy

Just for performance sake

And

There's a few ways like pythons

Quite complicated as like virtual amps and stuff

And like

I am not a python developer whatsoever

So I'm really an awful person

To be building a dev tool that's used by so many pythons developers

But I try my best

I know Ruby a lot better

Ruby is a lot simpler

And I think like the dependency story

That's never been an area that

Means touches me so about runtimes, tasks, environments

I am dabbling in it but like

I think coming from rust

I want that experience for everybody

And I think it's been out too like with RV

That is their goal and I think that that

And UV I think everybody wants

A cargo kind of experience for their languages

Because it's way better

To not have to remember bundle install

I think it's just a bit

So yeah I'm excited to see

What they're able to come up with

Because definitely need for that

A couple weeks ago like

I don't use a lot of node

And rails

In the webpacker area

Era was kind of like just assume

They're going to have yarn classic installed

It's like easy enough

But then I got into

Supporting core pack and stuff

And I was like oh my gosh

This is

Ridiculous that like

You have npm but

There's three or four versions of yarn

And then pnpm

Its own shims to install these

And thank goodness that we just have bundler

And that's all we have to worry about

In ruby at least for now fingers crossed

It stays that way

But the complexity of that environment

Is just like wild

So many different ways of

Installing things in the node modules folder

Or no we have a global line

And we simlink those

Or whatever optimizations they implement

It's like this is just a nightmare

To manage so

That brings me to a question that

My coworker wanted to ask you

Which was how hard is it to maintain

Meens because it seems like

An enormous amount of work

Because all these languages are quite a bit different

There's so many decisions to make

Along the way like even just the ruby

Releases in the versions

In the Shaws like

It feel like there's a lot of these sort of

Open-ended questions that are

Not easy to pick an answer to

Without making

Accidentally breaking changes

And stuff over time but i feel like you've

Been able to make it pretty darn

Easy to upgrade without breaking changes

And stuff but also supporting

Like everything

It feels like me is just supports

Any language i can think of

You know in terms of supporting languages

Like i just because i work i've been doing this

Right i've been supporting languages

With internal

Scripts and stuff so i've had a pretty good

Knowledge like what the idiosyncrasies

Are and what different languages are

And also like

They rhyme with each other

So in a lot of ways python and ruby

Are quite similar for example

There's differences but

I guess i just came with the experience

Necessary to be idiomatic

In every language best i can

Ironically though the one that i think

Meens is terrible as rust

I don't like using it with rust

And it suggests people don't

I did add it because a lot of people

Wanted it just use rust up

It's better

Also writing rust like

Rust is the best when it comes to dev tools

It is so so solid

That i think it's giving me a good

Norstar i'm like where i want

Other languages to get to

I have like very very few

Complaints about rust which is why

I can't meet that standard with news

But yeah with breaking changes

I think that

That is kind of evolved over time

From the beginning i knew that

I had to take a pragmatic approach

To it like i didn't think

Semper was going to work

At all because

So what if there's like a breaking

Change with like elixir

If you already know it you don't care

You know and i just thought there would be so

So much noise and we'd be a version

100 before we knew it

I just thought it wasn't realistic

As if it's a service

And not a CLI

Because when you use a service

Napi you're using the latest right

You don't get a choice of which version you have

You're just always on the latest

And like i've always wanted people

To be able to be on the latest

Was kind of the idea that you should just

Always be on the latest all the time

And when there is a breaking change

Let's say with Ruby for example

Like what i try to keep them very

Minimal only if it's this

And i have a very specific

Procedure that i go through

So initially nothing happens

The new feature gets added

So Ruby pre compile

You can opt into it if you look in the docs

And you find that somewhere

In a few months because it uses calvr

So i know like in version

2026.4.0

It will automatically start showing a

Deplication message that

This is going to become the default

You don't want to see this message you can default into it

Now where you can explicitly opt out

And then that will stay. The reason to wait

Is because i found that if you just like

Immediately throw a deprecation message

At the same time you add a new feature

Then the people that opt in

And they commit that configuration into their project

Now require all the other people using that project

Update that's frustrating

So that's why i wait a little bit

Let the thing make people

Chanced update on their own

And then there's less of that

There's still going to be people that are on 9 month old releases

At some point you just got to pull the trigger right

And so then we'll see the message a few months later

I actually if it's something i'm removing entirely

Ruby is not a good example of that

But occasionally there are breaking changes

With the old thing is just going to go away

Because i want to kill it

Then i actually have it fail to compile at that

If it's 2026.8.0

It will just like

Panic when it compiles

To me to go in and remove it

Because i don't remember

Right

That's kind of how i do breaking changes

So there's always breaking changes happen

And try to keep them minimal

But it follows a time process

And not a version process

Another thing is like

You can't use old versions of me

There's like things baked into it

The domain names

Different services that i don't control

And so like

Just like to run a one year old version of me

It just isn't

Yeah that makes a lot of sense

Because it is

In general you'll always want to use the latest version

There's almost no reason

You would ever want

That except for you

You may want to go

Look at and debug something or whatever

And see what

Like oops i missed something here

But as a user

I don't ever want that

I think i forget to update

Sometimes or whatever

And occasionally i'll have the

I'll remember to like

Homebrew update and upgrade

Or whatever but

And oh my zsh will prompt me occasionally

But i don't think does me

Has any like prompt for like

And i guess your time base

So you could kind of say

Hey you're six months old

You might want to consider updating

No i used to

Kill switch in it

But if you ran a three year old version

Or something or maybe two year old

It just wouldn't do anything

It just no

It did have this logic

It was like a month old

It would start showing it

And then like after all

It's just going to kill itself

Because really at that point

All bets are off

And the thing is not going to work right

For the reason i just said

This is very specific to me

None of my other projects

Use caliper

It's just because it's this

Source of all these dev tools

It has to be version has to be kept up to date

I think i did take that out

I think just as it kind of matured

And there wasn't going to be as many big changes

And it became clear to me

Like if it breaks it will break for the reason it broke

And i don't need to force people

But yeah

So i think i ended up taking that out

As i put the version everywhere

So if you run these install that says the version

And if i put the version all sorts of places

And because it uses caliper

You know the user sees that

And so if they submit

Lugger port

It usually doesn't get to that point

Like they'll probably copy and paste it in

And be like

Oh

That update this

And then it all sorts itself out

So i'm not getting a lot of issues from people

It's too that like

If i was to report a bug

And saw the version

It'll immediately

In my brain be like

Wait that's from 2024

Maybe i should just try to update

Because if it's version 7.32

I have no idea what the latest version is

There's no like

Reference there

But being calendar based

It makes total sense

For just like a little trigger to the user

Like hey you might want to update this

Yeah

That's interesting

That's funny i like that a lot

Because it would brought that up for me

It was like

I missed that in the docs about the pre-compiled rubies

Because i poked around the docs a whole ton

Recently but didn't see that

And then i was like

You know what i've not updated me locally

For i don't know how long

Maybe nine months or something

And i don't necessarily

Haven't had any issues

So there's really no reason to update

And the main thing maybe

Is like the new features

Or something that i want to use

That would be the other trigger for me to update

It's like something breaks

Or i want to use a new feature that i don't have

But neither one of those

Had come up for a while until i saw the

Like oh hey there's been pre-compiled rubies

For a little while now

And that's something i should really be aware of

And i just missed it

I'm going to have to maybe consider adopting that

Because in Ruby

I feel like we're just

Semantic versioning is kind of the

You know 99% of the way

Every project is managed

But that seems like

For those types of things

Incredibly useful where

Yeah you know what the specific version number

You're not integrating into

This is the library

The same way you are with like

A Ruby gem or something

So it's like yeah breaking changes

Probably don't matter

Meas is way too many

Releases and

There's way too many changes

That it is not realistic for users

To read the release notes

No where near it

So like it's just not an option

Like even if i was usingcember

Like a developer is really going to pay that much attention

If i'm bumping the major version

I don't know how often it would be bumped

But a lot more often than i'd like

Maybe i should use some more projects

Like we're so well for me

But my other projects

So like they tend to be like

I'll kind of be interested

And i'll work on it for a bit

And i'll work on something else

That means it's always always getting working

Even if it's not me, it's other people

There's a release every day pretty much

And i just have to

I don't run it too long

I actually built another tool

To do AI release notes

Because it's not just some like thing

Generated from the commits

Like cloud is actually going in

And like reading the source

Reading all the discussions

Let's communicate if anybody was interested

In using their own project

But it's basically just an LM agent

That is specific to release notes

And it does an amazing job

Of just kind of summarizing what happened

That would be a full time job for somebody

I think just to do that

And so it's remarkable

That use case there

I've tried to do that

Notes and whatever

And it's like

You're merging PRs

And you forgot that

I merged these seven

And these didn't make it to the change log

Or something

And then you like

Have to go reread through the whole dang thing yourself

And it's like

Yeah, just have the AI summarize that

That's a great use case

Any more questions

I mean, I just want to say thank you

For all these libraries

Like you've made our lives better

Not just with this new Ruby stuff

But I've been using these

Like almost since it came out

And I love it

Like the integral to my

Like my little cousin was like

I want to build my own app

I've got an idea

And I was like

Okay, I can get you set up easily

Because

No, thank you for using it

Appreciate that

I've got one quick question

At risk of studying

Like I'm blowing smoke or whatever

And you know, Mises kind of

It's the gold standard now for version management

And like, shying a bit away from the technical side of things

I kind of wanted to ask

When Mises kind of grew into that

And kind of exploded

What did that change for you

In terms of just

From a more personal side of things

Instead of like the technical conversation we've been having

Um

What did you think about that

Because it, you know, it didn't happen overnight

Right? So

Yeah, how long have you been working on Mises

I think it started

Fall of

2022

I want to say

Yeah, it's not that long

Yeah, really not that

Three and a half years

I had posted probably after

Was it going up for, I think, quickly

And now it seems like ages

Because you could do it in a day with an LLM

But it took me four months

And I post on like an ASCF issue

About performance because that was like

The main thing I was struggling with

And people immediately were using it

As like their main platform

So I had users right away

It struck a court in hindsight

There was a need for something to fill this role

Simply ASCF would faster

There really isn't any polyglot version

Matters aside from ASCF

And maybe next if you squint

Maybe docker

If you're squinting very hard

But people wanted something here

And anybody could have done it

And I just happened to be the one that did

But very can change this stuff

Like when I was just talking about like that

I definitely had to refine that to get that to where

It's not frustrating people

I think like the decision about

When to adopt a feature and when to

Pass on one

Is always a hard one

Like I took on task environment variables

And that was not

Met with universal happiness

Probably more negativity than happiness

People liked me because it

Did dev tools

And that's what they wanted for

They didn't want all those tasks stuff

But I really thought that was going to

Really empower it to be better

I think it has. I think people

And so

Now I'm having to dial that back

You know the scope can only increase so much

And so now I have to be more careful

Like right now

There's been a couple people that want me to improve the docker images

There's like stock docker images

I hate maintaining those

Don't like it

So I'm probably going to deprecate them

They've never really worked well

So it's not a big loss

There's like other things I'm considering

We'll see

People unhappy but the maze action

They get to have action

Hate maintaining that thing

Just hate get to have actions

It sucks. I don't enjoy it

We'll see

Like there are features people want to get it

I mean this is a hobby

So I got to do the things I like to do

I don't drop things often

But I'm certainly at the maximum

Of what I can take on

So I have to pick and choose

I think it's been coming up more often