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How does this have 71 upvotes in such a short time and two comments. It's a Ruby C extension for JSON, nothing more. Something fishy here, especially given that

How does this have 71 upvotes in such a short time and two comments. It's a Ruby C extension for JSON, nothing more. Something fishy here, especially given that a link on the homepage is "Vote on Hacker News."

rubyn00bie 10y ago
Because it's a known piece of software in the Ruby community, one that actually kicks ass. His work isn't new, this is probably being voted up by people who know of it... and what's really to comment on? I read the page, upvoted because I like the gem, and moved on.
- thesmallestcat 10y ago
  One hour after submission, it's in the top 10 in the past 24 hours. Come on. I'm not doubting there are Rubyists here, but something is clearly up. Submission of same project by OP (project author) yesterday got one vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178676
  - rubyn00bie 10y ago
    Getting to the front page of hackernews is more about timing than content. I've had submissions get no votes only to see the same article on the front page a few hours or days later. There's a lot of luck that goes into who is viewing and voting.
mountaineer 10y ago
Version 3.0 is being announced which is compatible with Ruby 2.4 and Rails 5. With this being a popular gem in the Ruby community, I'm guessing those are important milestones many folks are happy with.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
astrodust 10y ago
Some people do a lot of JSON encoding/decoding in Ruby and every bit of performance counts.
- ahoka 10y ago
  Don't use Ruby if performance counts. It's that simple.
  - rubyn00bie 10y ago
    I disagree but perhaps it's on semantics... A better statement would be: If the boxing/unboxing matters, don't use a language with objects. Use one that gives you value types to manipulate and serialize into. For some things, like Regexp, the language has almost zero overhead-- because it's done in C/bare metal. Additionally you could provide which languages/runtimes one should use.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Don't make comments like this if you don't understand why people use Ruby in the first place. Maybe your code is performing acceptably well, but if someone comes up to you and says "Hey, would you like some free performance with this drop-in replacement?" you'd be stupid to say no. There's a difference between performance being critical and performance being important.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Performance actually matters a lot in Ruby. The average coder doesn't (usually) have to deal with it, but chasing down performance issues in library code opens up more and more applications for Ruby to tackle. It would be awesome if Ruby could eventually become useful in every context. I think it'll eventually get there, but on the way there will need a mountain of performance improvements.
    - Xylakant 10y ago
      I don't think ruby will ever get to the point where it's useful or a good fit in every context. The optimization goals are pretty clearly laid out: developer performance and happiness over raw speed of the language. A lot of features don't lend themselves to easy performance optimization (open classes, the ability to change methods on individual objects, lots of the metaprogramming features etc.). It's just not ruby's goal to be fast on every platform and in every context. It's often fast enough, though.

rubyn00bie 10y ago

Because it's a known piece of software in the Ruby community, one that actually kicks ass. His work isn't new, this is probably being voted up by people who know of it... and what's really to comment on? I read the page, upvoted because I like the gem, and moved on.

thesmallestcat 10y ago
One hour after submission, it's in the top 10 in the past 24 hours. Come on. I'm not doubting there are Rubyists here, but something is clearly up. Submission of same project by OP (project author) yesterday got one vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178676
- rubyn00bie 10y ago
  Getting to the front page of hackernews is more about timing than content. I've had submissions get no votes only to see the same article on the front page a few hours or days later. There's a lot of luck that goes into who is viewing and voting.

mountaineer 10y ago

Version 3.0 is being announced which is compatible with Ruby 2.4 and Rails 5. With this being a popular gem in the Ruby community, I'm guessing those are important milestones many folks are happy with.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

astrodust 10y ago

Some people do a lot of JSON encoding/decoding in Ruby and every bit of performance counts.

ahoka 10y ago
Don't use Ruby if performance counts. It's that simple.
- rubyn00bie 10y ago
  I disagree but perhaps it's on semantics... A better statement would be: If the boxing/unboxing matters, don't use a language with objects. Use one that gives you value types to manipulate and serialize into. For some things, like Regexp, the language has almost zero overhead-- because it's done in C/bare metal. Additionally you could provide which languages/runtimes one should use.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Don't make comments like this if you don't understand why people use Ruby in the first place. Maybe your code is performing acceptably well, but if someone comes up to you and says "Hey, would you like some free performance with this drop-in replacement?" you'd be stupid to say no. There's a difference between performance being critical and performance being important.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  Performance actually matters a lot in Ruby. The average coder doesn't (usually) have to deal with it, but chasing down performance issues in library code opens up more and more applications for Ruby to tackle. It would be awesome if Ruby could eventually become useful in every context. I think it'll eventually get there, but on the way there will need a mountain of performance improvements.
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    I don't think ruby will ever get to the point where it's useful or a good fit in every context. The optimization goals are pretty clearly laid out: developer performance and happiness over raw speed of the language. A lot of features don't lend themselves to easy performance optimization (open classes, the ability to change methods on individual objects, lots of the metaprogramming features etc.). It's just not ruby's goal to be fast on every platform and in every context. It's often fast enough, though.