The Digital Press

Ruby is introducing an experimental "namespace on read" feature allowing virtual top-level namespaces that isolate loaded libraries and their dependencies, preventing conflicts and enabling multiple gem versions in a single process. The feature is enabled via an environment variable and aims to allow safer co-existence of code with overlapping names or incompatible dependencies.

Why it matters: This feature tackles common Ruby issues like conflicting global constants, unexpected shared state, and gem version clashes within the same process.

The big picture: The namespace model differs from traditional sub-interpreters by sharing a single GC heap and offering weaker isolation, raising questions about long-term viability and parallelism.

Stunning stat: Early benchmarks show about a 3-5% overhead in interpreter performance with namespaces enabled, with some crashes still being fixed.

Commenters say: The community is divided; some praise the bold innovation and potential, while many raise concerns about complexity, performance impact, unclear real-world use cases, and prefer sub-interpreters or process-based isolation.