What’s new in Ruby 2.6

Ruby, one of the more venerable dynamic languages, now has available the second beta release of Version 2.6.

What’s new in the Ruby 2.6 beta

Ruby 2.6 adds an initial implementation of a just-in-time compiler, to improve performance of program execution. Ruby’s JIT compiler “prints” C code to disk and produces a C compiler process to generate native code. This second beta is meant to see if this JIT capability works, as well as to find security risks before the production release.

In the beta, just-in-time compilation is supported only when a Ruby app is built by the GCC compiler or Clang and the compiler is available at runtime. Plans call for implementing method inlining in the compiler, to significantly increase performance. Support for Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE is planned as well.

Other features in the beta include:

• In a change to the language, $SAFE is a process global state and 0 can be set again.
• Improved performance of block-passing and passed block calling.
• Proc#call has been sped up.
• The bytes method has been added.
• The RubyVM::ASTmodule, which has a parse method that parses a code of string and returns AST nodes. Also, theparse filemethod parses a code file and return AST nodes.
• The experimental RubyVM::AST::Nodeclass surfaces location information and children nodes from Node.

Where to download the Ruby 2.6 beta

You can download the Ruby 2.6 beta from the Ruby project website.

What’s new in Ruby 2.5

Arriving on Christmas Day 2017, Ruby 2.5.0 is the first stable release in the 2.5 series.

It boosts performance by 5 to 10 percent by removing trace instructions from bytecode that has been found to be overhead. A dynamic instrumentation technique is used instead. Also, block passing by a block parameter has been made three times faster than it was in Ruby 2.4, through use of the Lazy Proc allocation technique.

Other features that improve performance include:

• Document generation has been boosted by switching from the legacy lexical analyzer from IRB to Ripper.
• The Mutex class has been rewritten to make it smaller and faster. Mutex can be used to manage access to shared data from concurrent threads.
• ERB generates code from a template at twice the speed as version 2.4.
• Performance has been improved in built-in methods including Array#concat, Enumerable#sort_by, and String#concat.

Other improvements in Ruby 2.5 include:

• Struct/new can create classes that accept keyword arguments.
• Do/end blocks will now work directly with ensure/rescue/else.
• The pp.rb library loads automatically.
• An option has been added to print backtrace in reverse order. The intent is to get the main error message without needing to scroll.
• To improve testing, support is offered for branch and method coverage measurement. Branch coverage reveals which branches are executed, while method coverage indicates which methods are invoked.

Ruby 2.5 also features a bug fix in which the SecureRandom library, for generating random numbers, which now prefers OS-provided sources over OpenSSL. Also, standard libraries such as cmath, csv, date, dbm, and ipaddr have been promoted to gems.

Where to download Ruby 2.5

You can download version 2.5 by opening this tar.gz file or this Zip file.