I concur writing new gems is a good idea as CPAN is often the only reason I have to return to perl for some quick tasks. As CPAN is the grandfather of all package management systems and probably of (inet) shared libraries too it is perfectly clear why rubygems lacks the amount of available solutions to certain problem spaces. Doesn't mean we cannot get there some day :) So I'd say I. let's build more & sometimes better gems and II. use wrappers for C libs where money/time constraints are too significant to DIY (e.g. https://github.com/ffi/ffi/wiki/Basic-Usage ) Bottom line: try to share and contribute whenever possible. Love your language diversity :)