Ruby Can Be Faster with a Bit of Rust

In spring of 2013, Sam Saffron committed fast_blank to GitHub. It was a C extension that provided a fast drop-in alternative to ActiveSupport's String#blank? method which returns whether a string is nothing but whitespace.

At Full Stack Fest 2015, Yehuda Katz presented a talk where he described his investigation into rewriting fast_blank in Rust. His initial goal was to try a naive one-liner (excluding his implementation of Buf) and see how much slower it was than the original C extension.

extern "C" fn fast_blank(buf: Buf) -> bool {
  buf.as_slice().chars().all(|c| c.is_whitespace())
}

To his surprise, it was faster.

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by Robert Qualls via SitePoint