Some Ruby operations are painfully slow but writing a C extension to fix them is a big commitment. I wanted to explore an alternative: compile C# to a native shared library with NativeAOT and call it from Ruby using FFI. I picked C# because I know it and love its standard library. To see if it holds up I built a benchmark, reimplementing ActiveSupport’s String#parameterize in ~20 lines of C# stdlib code.

Today marks the release of Xsv 1.0.0, a high performance, pure-Ruby gem to parse .xlsx (Excel) files

TL;DR I wrote a super fast Excel file reader called Xsv, check it out! It’s fast and low on memory because it uses a SAX-based XML parser instead of a DOM-based one. Here’s some benchmarks to prove it.

Simple API for XML, or SAX for short is an event-based API, of which development started in December 1997 1. It is an alternative to the well-known Document Object Model, which was developed around the same time 2.