Ruby itself is just such an enabler.
https://ankane.org/new-ml-gems
Any thoughts on what the Ruby community would need to build in order for it to become an attractive tool for AI work?
Maybe that's why Ruby is best known for Ruby on Rails.
Something would need to happen that makes Ruby far more attractive. Say performance parity with Crystal or Nim.
The main thing is that it's part of the standard library. If you import a gem anyway, often you'd be well off with sqlite.
As for storage format, there's also:
https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-3.1.2/libdoc/yaml/rdoc/YAML/Stor...
I even created a little gem when I was starting with Ruby, 10 years ago, that was a very thin wrapper around it so that I could play around using an ActiveRecord like syntax (https://github.com/brunnogomes/active_yaml). I used in some pet projects so I could do stuff like:
p = Post.new
p.title = "Great post!"
p.body = "Lorem ipsum..."
p.save
Post.all # => [#<Post:0x895bb38 @title="Great post!", @body="Lorem ipsum...", @id=1>]
Post.find(1) # => #<Post:0x954bc69 @title="Great post!", @body="Lorem ipsum...", @id=1>
Post.where(author: 'Brunno', visibility: 'public')
# => [#<Post:0x895bb38 @author="Brunno", @visibility="public", @id=1>, #<Post:0x457pa36 @author="Brunno", @visibility="public", @id=2>]
Good times!
Sure there are many things that "should" have been fixed above - but just having any old ruby version on hand was enough to help check for a memory leak and mitigate it - while taking the time to figure out if the leak could be plugged.
And offline support (a server in dmz/locked down wrt new software) is big too!
Such as?
This is bad enough on its own, but it also makes pivoting a file read/write primitive into code execution much easier.
Or maybe it would be a hard task that didn't justify the effort.
It's now no longer technically stdlib, but a "default gem", a gem that is installed by default with ruby, see: https://stdgems.org/
Since a few years every version remove one or two rarely used default gems. The Ruby core team just doesn't like big breaking changes.