Ruby 1.9.0 Released

sciurus0 writes "The 1.9.0 development version of the Ruby programming language has been released. This version has many changes, including a new virtual machine that provides great speed improvements."

Re:Benchmarks mean nothing, specially these ones.

[sciurus0]

According to Chu Yeow [codefront.net], Mongrel doesn't run on 1.9.0 yet. Neither does Rails. The release of 1.9.0 coincided with the API freeze for 1.9.x, so hopefully projects that were holding off on porting to 1.9 will do so now. The situation is complicated by 1.9's transitional nature; you should stick with 1.8 if you absolutely need stability.

Re:Why Ruby?

[sciurus0]

Alright, I know this is going to be flame fodder, but I'm genuinely curious: does Ruby have anything to offer for someone who's already very proficient in Python (and Django, so Rails is already covered)?

Take a glance at Ruby from other languages [ruby-lang.org]. This page highlights some of the things that make Ruby Ruby.

Re:Why Ruby?

[eosp]

I thought that the ? suffix meant "this makes no modifications and only returns a certain property, usually boolean" and ! meant "this modifies the "self" object. Example: foo.gsub!(/f/, 'g') would modify 'foo' directly, where foo.gsub(/f/, 'g') would return a new string but leave the old one unmodified.

Re:where's unicode?

[Riemann hypothesis]

There is support for Unicode in Ruby 1.9. An encoding is now associated to a string and you can also perform transcoding, therefore converting a given string amongst different formats (e.g. UTF-8 and ASCII).

Re:I'd like something else.

[chromatic]

There's a Ruby implementation on Parrot called Cardinal. It stalled for a while until the Parrot 0.5.0 release in November, but that should have cleared the next few roadblocks.

Re:Benchmarks mean nothing, specially these ones.

[Matrix9180]

The plans are to have Rails 2.1 ruby 1.9 compatible.