Rails 7.2.beta1 has been released

The next release of rails comes with some neat benefits

Rails 7.2.beta1 dropped last night, around the same time as Ruby 3.3.2, so I took the time to upgrade both. Here are my top three features of the forthcoming Rails 7.2 release:

The Dockerfile now includes jemalloc by default

Anyone dealing with memory bloat in rails app has likely been advised to try installing jemalloc:

jemalloc is a general purpose malloc(3) implementation that emphasizes fragmentation avoidance and scalable concurrency support.

Having this as a default in rails dockerfiles gives me confidence that it’s the right way to go. It’s no substitute for tracking down the actual source of memory leaks of course, but I saw a decent drop in my memory use after upgrading.

RAM use went from well over 550 MB, to around 350 MB. That’s pretty cool. I know I can do more to get the number down, but this is a good start.

YJIT is enabled by default

Shopify’s YJIT was merged to Ruby a while back, and is now enabled by default for anyone running Ruby 3.3+ on Rails 7.2. If it makes ruby apps faster, then I’ll take it.

Brakeman and Rubocop in the Gemfile

New rails 7.2 apps now come with both Brakeman and Rubocop in the Gemfile:

group :development, :test do
  # Static analysis for security vulnerabilities [https://brakemanscanner.org/]
  gem "brakeman", require: false

  # Omakase Ruby styling [https://github.com/rails/rubocop-rails-omakase/]
  gem "rubocop-rails-omakase", require: false
end

Great. Security analysis and code linting. No more arguing with myself over either of these things.

There are a ton of other exciting improvements with this update, and you can read the release notes here.

Amen.