There's other good reasons to be "pure Ruby", educational value: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757009 An

There's other good reasons to be "pure Ruby", educational value: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757009 And also, while not terribly relevant in this specific case, deployment is easier if you don't have to build native libraries. Sometimes it's worth going to C bindings for runtime speed, sometimes it's better to keep it purely native for development speed or other reasons.