Great Christmas gift from matz and other contributors: Ruby 1.9

Some highlights:

  • Around 2x performance increase in many cases, thanks to YARV-based code
  • Nice syntax enhancements, like (1..10).reduce(:+) # => 55
  • JavaScript-style literal hashes: {var: “value”}
  • Lots of other enhancements

Ruby 1.9 is a development release, and contains a lot of experimental features. For production, it’s recommended to continue using 1.8 branch.