I talked about "Goodbye fat gem" at RubyKaigi Takeout 2020. Fat gem is a gem that includes pre-built binaries. Extension libraries can assume that users have build environment with Ruby 2.4 or later. So gems don't need to bundle pre-built binaries for easy to install. Users can build binaries by themselves.

As of 2025, we're still using fat gem...

I discussed how to improve this situation with ruby-installer author, Nokogiri maintainer and RubyGems community in 2022:

• https://gist.github.com/postmodern/4c0cbccc0c7eda4585db0fc5267cdd57
• https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/1296

I propose a solution based on these discussions.