BuffaloFeeds » Ruby Inside » Ruby 1.9.3 Preview 1 Released – What’s New?

Feeds

105363 items (97572 unread) in 19 feeds

Friends (1021 unread)

• 2 Star (84 unread)
• John Carrino (12 unread)
• Comments for Josh the Outspoken (296 unread)
• Josh (34 unread)
• Planet Matt (595 unread)

Build (68091 unread)

• MAKE Magazine (20292 unread)
• Instructables.com (35006 unread)
• Hack A Day (5017 unread)
• Toolmonger (7776 unread)

Heads (716 unread)

• Exploration Through Example
• Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed (113 unread)
• Stevey's Blog Rants (34 unread)
• Joel on Software (207 unread)
• Gibson Blog (239 unread)
• Adventures in Bloggery (123 unread)

News (27537 unread)

• Slashdot (25203 unread)
• Economist.com Global Agenda (1412 unread)
• Ruby Inside (922 unread)

fun (207 unread)

• Templar, Arizona (207 unread)

Ruby Inside

• 

  Ruby 1.9.3 Preview 1 Released – What’s New?

  Posted: August 1st, 2011, 8:01am MDT by Peter Cooper

  Over on the ruby-talk mailing list, Yuki "Yugui" Sonoda announced the release of Ruby 1.9.3 Preview 1:

  I have just released Ruby 1.9.3 preview1. This is the first preview of Ruby 1.9.3 releases.

  I know there are still minor known issues on 1.9.3 but I believe it will be fixed before the release of Ruby 1.9.3-p0. Let's try it out. If you have any trouble on it, please let us know it.

  Yugui

  It's important to note that this is not the latest production release of Ruby 1.9 (that remains Ruby 1.9.2-p290 for now) but is a preview release so you can try out your libraries and other important code ahead of the full production release of Ruby 1.9.3-p0.

  Pick up the tarfile of the release at [ftp.ruby-lang.org] if you fancy a crawl about. If you want to check it out with RVM, instructions follow.

  Key Updates

  Let's waltz through some of Ruby 1.9.3 preview 1's key updates over the existing Ruby 1.9.2:

  • The load.c patch discussed at length in this post is in! Yes, faster loading times in Rails 3.x should now be yours to enjoy :-)
  • Previously Ruby has been released under a joint GPLv2 and "Ruby" license. Ruby 1.9.3 is now licensed under a joint 2-clause BSD license and the "Ruby" license.
  • The openssl library has new maintainers and is, supposedly, a lot better for it.
  • io/console is an all new library in the standard library. It's by Nobu Nakada and adds console capabilities to IO instances. On inclusion, it adds raw, raw!, getch, echo=, echo?, noecho, winsize, winsize=, iflush, oflush, ioflush methods to IO instances and offers a class method called console. I'll try and write about it soon.
  • test/unit gains parallel test running support
  • Michael Edgar has made some significant improvments to Ripper, the built-in Ruby parser and parser hooks in 1.9. On Hacker News he suggests that "it's close to being ready to power a full Ruby implementation at this point"
  • The pathname and date libraries were reimplemented in C, primarily for performance reasons. A quick benchmark shows significant improvements in Date's performance.

  Ruby 1.9.3 is also specifically covered in our Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough, a mega screencast aimed at Ruby 1.8.7 developers who want to learn all about what's new, what's gone, and what's different in Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3.

  How to Give 1.9.3 Preview 1 A Try With RVM

  If you're using RVM to manage your Ruby installations (and you should - learn how in this video) and you want to give 1.9.3-preview1 a spin, try:

  rvm get head
  rvm reload
  rvm install 1.9.3-preview1
  rvm use 1.9.3
  

  I wouldn't advise running an rvm upgrade at this time since it's not production-ready, but you can try installing your usual gems and, ideally, libraries that you develop and maintain so that we can all have a smooth upgrade to 1.9.3 in the next couple of months.