Musings

In his usual understated way, Yuhi Sonoda announced the first Ruby 1.9.1 release candidate earlier today on the ruby-talk mailing list.

Hi, folks

Ruby 1.9.1 has been just released.

This is a release candidate of Ruby 1.9.1, which will be the first stable version of Ruby 1.9 series. Try it early and have a experience of modern, faster, with clearer syntax, multilingualized and much improved Ruby world.

We have fixed 72 bugs and implemented some features:

http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-19/issues?query_id=9

If you encounter a bug or a problem, please let us know it via the official issue tracking system (http://redmine.ruby-lang.org ).

I am a fan of Ruby and look forward to every release.  My first introduction to Ruby was way back in early days of 1997 just after Ruby 1.0 was released by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz) whose blog, or as the Japanese prefer to term it web diary is here.  Since then I have used it from time to time for various small scripts in the same why that I also use Perl.  I recommend it to people when asked what programming language they should learn first.  My only reservations are that traditionally Ruby tends to be somewhat slow compared to other popular scripting langauges and that there now any number of Ruby implementations which leads to some portability issues.  Performance has improved with every release and there is no reason nowadays not to use Ruby in production enviroments.

This release is significant in that it is the first release candidate of Ruby 1.9.1 which is targeted to be the first stable production-grade version of the Ruby 1.9 (aka Yarv) series.  Ruby 1.9 is intended to be a major evolation of the Ruby language akin to Python 3.0 or Perl 6.  Old crud and langauge features that were, in hindsight, poorly designed have been removed.  A number of new language features are implemented.&nbsp If you want more information about the changes in Ruby 1.9, a good reference to start with is Mauricio Fernandez’s Changes in Ruby 1.9.  With this release, the language features are frozen except for multiligual support is some of the standard libraries which come with Ruby.  I have played with beta releases of Ruby 1.9 for some time now and am pleased with the language changes and especially the improved threading model.

As I said previously, there is not one single implementation of the Ruby language.&nbsp The implementation released today is regarded as the official Ruby language implementation in