I'm not a hardcore rubyist, but from my experience, this seems like an obvious no-brainer. Gems play an enviable position in the Ruby ecosystem and if often emu

I'm not a hardcore rubyist, but from my experience, this seems like an obvious no-brainer. Gems play an enviable position in the Ruby ecosystem and if often emulated in other programming languages. I can't imagine Ruby (or Rails) being as popular as it is without the help of Gems. Making stdlib a gem means that stdlib can be updated independent of the Ruby language. That means bug fixes, security updates and improvements can be made more often. There is a similar push in the .NET community to extract certain parts of .NET into NuGet. As it works now, you have to wait for an update for all of .NET (or worse, Visual Studio), which may take years. So called "out of band" releases always seems to have poor support because so many .NET frameworks rely on an upgrade of VS to really use! (E.g., ASP.NET MVC 3) For something fast-moving like the web, this is an eternity.