Ruby 1.9 #bostonrb Writeup

The main message I took home from last night's #bostonrb meeting is that when moving to Ruby 1.9 a lot of things will inevitably break, because some of the changes are not going to be backwards compatible. So even if you sanitize your code, think about all the gems and plugins you are using: will they have sanitized their code too? And how will THEY keep backwards compatibility?

This last question was raised at the meeting and there was no good answer. The option that prevailed was to keep two separate files and load the one that corresponds to the running version.

It was emphasized that it will be crucial to have a good test coverage when making the transition. It will probably be a good idea having a plan to get your code ready.

1.9 is being frozen at the end of this month, and is slated to be release on 12/21.

Other than that backwards compatibility issues, 1.9 will:

• have better performance
• have some new features
• have more bugs

Bruce Williams (@wbruce)was the person who presented the new Ruby 1.9. He has a tool that will let you compare the results of running code in 1.8 x 1.9 here, it's pretty cool:

http://github.com/bruce/compare-1-9/tree/master

+ a post from his blog on 1.9:

Arrow Lambdas, a Ruby 1.9 Vignette

Here is a pdf version I dugg out of Bruce's Ruby 1.9 presentation that is dated around April/2008.

The other presenter, Francis Hwang, also had some interesting stuff. He talked about some very interesting dynamic programming gotchas. Unfortunately, the link to his presentation pdf file doesn't work, only a link to an mp3 recording of a previous presentation on the same topic, "The API Construction Set":

Assorted Good Stuff

If any new pdf files from this meeting gets posted to the bostonrb mailing list I will update this post with links to them.

I can't neglect to mention that the meeting, as always, was hosted by Sermo, which provides not only a nice space but also amazing food. And they are hiring tons.

UPDATE ON 09/11/08: Francis sent #bostonrb his slides in pdf.
UPDATE ON 09/15/08: Bruce sent a link to a blog post with his slides.

Comments

[Dan Croak]

Thanks for the writeup, Carlisia. I always like being able to visually review notes from a talk to absorb it.

One note: at Lone Star last week, Matz said 1.9.1 will be released on 12/21 ("around Christmas").

[carlisia]

Dan,

Thanks and thanks for the correcting the date, I made the change.