If you’ve never built a Ruby gem, go do that first. It’s amazingly easy. And it lets other people use your stuff!

When you do you’ll have to figure out – how much goes into one gem? What should you cut up into new gems?

Here’s how you tell.

What’s the Big Idea?

You want your gem to have one basic idea. Then, cut out everything that isn’t part of that idea. If your gem solves differential equations… Great! Don’t expose methods for memory allocation just because you wrote them.

The people who download your gem are busy, and they have short attention spans.

So you get to tell them one thing. What’s that one thing?

Aren’t Gems Inefficient?

People from other languages make fun of five-line gems. Ruby people usually know better.

A Ruby gem can do amazing things in five lines – single ideas that don’t take more than that can be awesome.

If you’re using 20 kilobytes to package up five lines of text… Dude! It’s 20 kilobytes. You waste more than that in TCP headers checking gmail every five minutes.

Gems are cheap. I promise.

Helping people see your amazing idea is priceless. Don’t shovel in hundreds of lines of crap so it seems “more serious.” Just show off the important part.

How Big is Too Big?

There are many explanations of the problems with God Objects, a.k.a. Monster Objects – objects that do too much and know too much.

Libraries can have the same problem.

A library that knows too much is giving you orders. RSpec includes its own mocking library… And so it’s hostile to people who like RR (Ruby Double) or Mocha. It forces you to do things its way. Is that why you started programming Ruby?

As much as I love ActiveSupport, it does the same thing. It requires very specific versions. It monkeypatches the core libraries. It’s just not friendly to people who want to do their own thing.

In the end, this is like “one idea” up above… If you force your users to do it your way, they’ll hate your gem. Show them something awesome and they’ll love it.

But I Want Numbers!

I can’t give you a maximum number of lines for your gem. But here are some rough ideas:

ActiveRecord is about 30,000 lines… And it’s a huge gem. If you’re writing more Ruby than this in one go, you’d better have a really good reason. And its largest file (associations.rb) is still only around 1500 lines. That’s a lot of Ruby code.

Pony is a fabulously useful email gem, which mostly wraps another, worse email gem. It’s only 500 lines, and half of that is tests. I do not care that it’s “too small.” I care that it works well and the interface is awesome. If it were only 10 lines, I would still use it happily.

The important thing, for both of them is: the gem has one central idea, and it stays true to it.

You should do the same.