Rv, a new kind of Ruby management tool

Summary

25 Aug 2025rv, a new kind of Ruby management toolFor the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’t just manage your ruby versions, it installs pre-compiled rubies so you don’t have to wait for ruby to compile from source every time. And more than all of that, it makes it completely trivial to run any script or tool written in ruby, even if that script or tool needs a different ruby than your application does.During all those years of daydreaming, I’ve been hoping someone else would build this tool and I could just use it. Then I discovered that someone did build it… but for Python. It’s called uv, and almost exactly one year ago version 0.3 shipped with all the features I had wished for, and even a few more that I hadn’t thought to wish for.Originally created as an alternative to pip, poetry, and all the other Python dependency managers, uv grew to encompass several existing tools, and has a few completely new tricks up its sleeve.At this point, I’ve been using uv for almost a year and I have to say, it is really, really good. The combination of speed, reliability, and functionality creates a spectacularly good experience. No more changing a package as you install something new only to realize later you broke something old, no more setting up dependencies manually only to have the cronned script break later.About a month ago, I decided that if there was no tool like this for Ruby, I would make one rather than keep dreaming about it. I want to bring all the tricks and innovations of cargo, npm, and uv into a tool for Ruby: rv.The first and biggest trick is simply how fast everything is because rv is written in Rust, like uv is. We expect to be able to silently run equivalents of both rvm install and bundle install at the beginning of every bundle exec, with everything still feeling faster than it ever has before.The n...