Comment by vidarh

100%. Optimising "bundle install" etc. is optimizing the wrong thing. You don't even need this to work from gems in general. It'd have solved a lot of problems just to have it work for "bundle install" in standalone mode, where all the files are installed to a directory anyway.

But in general, one of the biggest problems with Ruby for me is how $LOAD_PATH causes combinatoric explosion when you add gems because every gem is added, due to the lack of any scoping of require's to packages.

The existence of multiple projects to cache this is an illustration that this is a real issue. I've had project in the past where starting the app took minutes purely due to require's, and where we shaved minutes off by crude manipulation of the load path, as most of that time was pointless stat calls.