Ruby 2.0 Released

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Ruby developers release Ruby 2.0.0, which represents the first stable release of the language since Ruby 1.9 was released in December 2007.

Ruby is “a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity.” According to the website, Ruby creator Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to balance functional programming with imperative programming.

Highlights of the Ruby 2.0 release include keyword arguments, which give flexibility to API design; asynchronous exception handling API; DTrace support enabling run-time diagnosis in production; an improved tracing API; and various performance enhancements. Additionally, the default character encoding for Ruby scripts has been changed from US-ASCII to UTF-8.

According to the website, Ruby 2.0.0 maintains nearly full backward compatibility with the previous version, and migration from 1.9 to 2.0 will be easier than from 1.8 to 1.9. Additionally, many improvements have been made to the documentation, based on user requests. The website states that Ruby 2.0.0 will be about 75% documented.

The developers also have included a new feature called Refinements, which adds a new concept to Ruby’s modularity. The Refinements is currently experimental, and the specification is likely to change; the developers would welcome feedback on this feature.

02/26/2013

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