January 5, 2026
How ruby-libgd brings a real raster engine back to Ruby
For many years, Ruby quietly lost something fundamental:
The ability to generate images natively, fast, and with full control.
Yes, RMagick and MiniMagick exist. But they depend on external binaries, are slow, fragile in production, and unsuitable for things like:
- map tile generation
- dashboards
- reports
- scientific plotting
- image processing pipelines
At RubyConf 2025 this weakness was openly acknowledged: generating images and map tiles in Ruby is a real problem.
When I saw that, I could not believe it. How could a language so widely used for backends and data processing lack a modern raster engine?
So I built one.
That is how ruby-libgd was born.
Read the complete article here:
https://rubystacknews.com/2026/01/07/ruby-can-now-draw-maps-and-i-started-with-ice-cream/
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