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In the video titled 'Breaking the Ruby Performance Barrier' by Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, delivered at RubyKaigi 2024, the speaker discusses the advancements in Ruby's performance driven by the WET project, an initiative started at Shopify to improve the language's speed through the development of a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler.

Key Points Discussed:
- **Overview of WET Project:**  WET was initiated to increase Ruby's speed while maintaining 100% compatibility. It is open-source and features contributions from various developers, including notable ones from GitHub.
- **Performance Improvements:** Ruby 3.3 included significant updates to WET, with optimizations leading to improved performance and reduced memory usage. Many users reported noticeable speedups, and platforms like GitHub and Mastodon benefited from WET’s implementation.
- **Lessons from Aviation:** The speaker draws parallels between the evolution of supersonic flight and Ruby's performance challenges, emphasizing that as speed increases, the traditional methods of optimization may not suffice.
- **Limitations of C Extensions:** Traditionally, C extensions were used for performance enhancements, but as Ruby’s speed improves, the cost of using C functions becomes less appealing. 
- **Pure Ruby Implementations:** The talk highlights the possibility of writing high-performance gems in pure Ruby, with a focus on two examples—Redis and GraphQL—where significant improvements were achieved with WET, showing pure Ruby implementations can rival their C counterparts.
- **Proto Buff Initiative:** The speaker discusses the development of a pure Ruby alternative to Google’s Proto Buff library, showcasing how it has been optimized for better performance alongside WET features, achieving impressive speedups.
- **Future Directions for Ruby:** Suggests future enhancements for Ruby's development, including improvements in low-level operations and better native library interfacing. Emphasizes that moving towards pure Ruby solutions could mitigate the burdens associated with C extensions and native dependencies.

Conclusion:
The advancements made through the WET project signal a new era for Ruby, where pure Ruby gems can achieve performances previously thought possible only through C. The WET team is actively working on further enhancements, and Ruby developers are encouraged to adapt and leverage these new capabilities to refine and boost overall Ruby performance.

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