This started as a comment on Geoff’s post but seemed to justify knocking the dust off this thing.

Apparently there are some people who feel that it’s ‘impossible’ to get patches into rails and that the core team doesn’t communicate with its user base. As someone who spends a lot of my time helping others contribute to rails I find the ‘impression’ hard to reconcile with my own experience. We have an active mailing list and irc channel where discussion takes place almost every day.

In the 2.0 effort we’ve received patches from 177 different individuals ranging from minor typo fixes, through to entire new features. So if you’ve got some killer ideas to contribute, subscribe to the core list and start talking about them. 2.0 is almost here, but there’s plenty of scope for new or improved functionality in rails.next, and we’d love to hear from you.

Rails 2.0 has had several profiling-driven optimisations we found by benchmarking real applications rather than hello world apps. Named routes were a common source of slowness in big applications, so 2.0 has new code that makes them several times faster. Repeatedly parsing Dates and Times from database also contributed to performance problems, so we have code to cache the results and for good measure we made the parsing faster too.

I’m not saying we’ve solved all the problems, or that rails is now perfect. No framework is! If you have an idea for improving performance, and a profiler report showing it makes a big difference, join the irc channel and lets talk about it, we’re always open to ideas.

Like any open source project rails depends on you, the community, for contributions. If you have something you feel like fixing, jump on in!