Top all-time · #3302
Inside Skylight
Company blog · blog.skylight.ioprogrammingweb
Inside Skylight is the company blog at blog.skylight.io, writing about programming and web. Since 2014, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Use Rust from Ruby”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Skylight's blog for posts on Rust in Ruby projects, such as Helix for adding Rust to existing Ruby code, and for explanations of Rust ownership and resource handling.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Development of the smart profiler for Ruby on Rails.
Most-linked posts?
- Use Rust from Ruby5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-10-31
- Helix: Rust and Ruby, Without the Glue5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-05-14
- Rust means never having to close a socket4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-10-07
What Hacker News says?
What's going on here is a bit of shorthand. If you don't use the shorthand, the signature looks like: fn access<'a, T: Send>(guard: &'a mut MutexGuard<T>) -> &'a mut T; This says that the incoming borrow and the returned borrows have identical scopes (officially called "lifetimes" in Rust; 'a here is a lifetime variable.) It's a very typical pattern: if you return some borrowed data, it generally comes from a borrow…
Comment linking /rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-socket/
on “Fearless concurrency with Rust”Submitted Rust means never having to close a socket as a story · 337 points
HN discussionCongratulations Yehuda and Steve! We've been using Rust in production for awhile now, specifically because of its combo of native speed and memory safety[1]. This bending of traditional tradeoffs has let us implement features that would have been otherwise impossible. Interfacing with Ruby via its C APIs, we are able to do some pretty crazy stuff, like sample memory allocations in production with imperceptible overh…
Comment linking /announcing-memory-traces/
on “Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik Are Joining the Rust Core Team”Submitted Helix: Rust and Ruby, Without the Glue as a story · 318 points
HN discussionI think they are referring to this http://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-... in the blogpost
Comment linking /bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-native-gems-with-rust/
on “Rust once, run everywhere”Submitted Skylight, a Ruby profiler, free for open source applications as a story · 120 points
HN discussionHave you heard about Helix? - http://blog.skylight.io/introducing-helix/ I think this is a great way to introduce large existing Ruby codebases to Rust in increments, much like Sentry demonstrated recently, but for Python: https://blog.sentry.io/2016/10/19/fixing-python-performance-...
Comment linking /introducing-helix/
on “2017 Rust Roadmap”Submitted A New Sense of Purpose for Rails as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI remember Skylight.io did something similar with Ruby. Edit: http://blog.skylight.io/introducing-helix/
Comment linking /introducing-helix/
on “Fixing Python Performance with Rust”Submitted The Log-Normal Reality: Why I Should Have Paid Attention In My Statistics Class as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRust's ownership model does more than just allow avoiding a garbage collector. It allows managing arbitrary resources more easily, so it is clear who is control of things at any point of time, e.g. if a function takes a File, who should close it (if the callee closes it, or if the caller needs to) is just a matter of documentation, while it is expressed naturally in the Rust type signature, and is hence checked by c…
Comment linking /rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-socket/
on “Two Weeks of Rust”Submitted The Tilde Art Project You Have to See to Believe as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe interesting thing about Rust, is that the manual memory management actually feels a lot like automatic memory management, moreover it applies to any resource[1], not just memory, (unlike in a GC'ed language) 1 - http://blog.skylight.io/rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-s...
Comment linking /rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-socket
on “What Rust Can Do That Other Languages Can't”Submitted Use Rust from Ruby as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI agree. I personally found these two blog posts to be useful introductions to ownership and borrowing: http://blog.skylight.io/rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-s... http://arthurtw.github.io/2014/11/30/rust-borrow-lifetimes.h...
Comment linking /rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-socket/
on “Rust Programming Language Book”Submitted Rust Means Never Having to Close a Socket (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWe used to do this in Rust, but have found RAII much better for this. Dealing with multiple resources open at once can quickly become painful. See http://blog.skylight.io/rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-s...
Comment linking /rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-socket/
on “A Programming Language for Games: Demo [video]”Submitted Fixing That Mysterious Slow Request in Your Rails App as a story · 2 points
HN discussionArticles like this one, and the recent project on libraries like Helix http://blog.skylight.io/introducing-helix/ make me awfully tempted to rewrite inner loops in certain production Ruby projects in Rust.
Comment linking /introducing-helix/
on “FasterPath: Faster Pathname Handling for Ruby Written in Rust”Submitted A New Sense of Purpose for Rails as a story · 2 points
HN discussion*JRuby A lot of good things going on in this space like Helix ( http://blog.skylight.io/introducing-helix/ ) The concept of using Ruby with external optimisations using Rust or whatever feels a lot like C with inline ASM - really like where it's going
Comment linking /introducing-helix/
on “Why it's important to optimise the tricky parts of Ruby [video]”Submitted Bending the Curve: Writing Safe and Fast Native Gems with Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-...
Comment linking /bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-native-gems-with-rust/
on “Using Go to improve your Ruby application's performance”Submitted What's in a name? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAnother alternative using Rust... http://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-...
Comment linking /bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-native-gems-with-rust/
on “Using Go to improve your Ruby application's performance”Submitted Bringing Sanity to JavaScript UTC Dates with Moment.js and Ember Data as a story · 1 points
HN discussionand not really anybody else, because the rest haven't really figured it out yet. I beg to differ there. ;) I work on Skylight ( https://www.skylight.io ) which is definitely doing some interesting stuff in the APM space. By focusing on just Rails, we are able to provide features that other services that try to be a jack-of-all-trades frequently miss. For example, we just rolled out a feature that helps you monitor m…
Comment linking /announcing-memory-traces/
on “New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts”
