History of Ruby

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The history of the Ruby programming language began when Yukihiro Matsumoto first conceived of the language in 1993, then released it in 1995. Annual releases of the language often take place on Christmas Day. Interest in the language surged around 2005 because of the Ruby on Rails framework.

Contents

Ruby 2.0

It was released exactly 20 years after Ruby was first conceived. [1]

Ruby 2.2

Ruby 2.2.0 was released on Christmas Day in 2014. [2] The release includes speed-ups, bugfixes, and library updates and removes some deprecated APIs. Most notably, Ruby 2.2.0 introduces changes to memory handling  an incremental garbage collector, support for garbage collection of symbols and the option to compile directly against jemalloc. It also contains experimental support for using vfork(2) with system() and spawn(), and added support for the Unicode 7.0 specification.

Features that were made obsolete or removed include callcc, the DL library, Digest::HMAC, lib/rational.rb, lib/complex.rb, GServer, Logger::Application as well as various C API functions. [3]

PowerPC64 performance
Since version 2.2.1, [4] Ruby MRI performance on PowerPC64 was improved. [5] [6] [7]

Ruby 2.3

Ruby 2.3.0 was released on Christmas Day in 2015. A few notable changes include:

The 2.3 branch also includes many performance improvements, updates, and bugfixes including changes to Proc#call, Socket and IO use of exception keywords, Thread#name handling, default passive Net::FTP connections, and Rake being removed from stdlib. [9]

Ruby 2.4

Ruby 2.4.0 was released on Christmas Day in 2016. A few notable changes include:

The 2.4 branch also includes performance improvements to hash table, Array#max, Array#min, and instance variable access. [10]

Ruby 2.5

Ruby 2.5.0 was released on Christmas Day in 2017. [11] A few notable changes include:

On top of that come a lot of performance improvements like faster block passing (3 times faster), faster Mutexes, faster ERB templates and improvements on some concatenation methods.

Ruby 2.6

Ruby 2.6.0 was released on Christmas Day in 2018. [12] A few notable changes include:

Ruby 2.7

Ruby 2.7.0 was released on Christmas Day in 2019. [13] A few notable changes include:

Ruby 3.0

Ruby 3.0.0 was released on Christmas Day in 2020. [14] It is known as Ruby 3x3. One of its main aims was to switch the interpreter to a Just-In-Time Compiler, to make programs faster.

Ruby 3.1

Version 3.1.0 was released on Christmas of 2021. It included an autocomplete feature. [15]

Ruby 3.2

Ruby 3.2.0 was released on Christmas Day of 2022. It includes support for WebAssembly. [16]

Ruby 3.3

Ruby 3.3.0 was released on 25 December 2023. It adds a new parser named Prism, uses Lrama as a parser generator, adds a new pure-Ruby JIT compiler named RJIT, and many performance improvements especially YJIT. [17]

References

  1. McAllister, Neil (2013-02-26). "Ruby 2.0.0 adds syntax sparkle, boosts performance". The Register. Retrieved 2025-03-24.
  2. "Ruby 2.2.0 Released". December 25, 2014. Retrieved January 4, 2015.
  3. "ruby/NEWS at v2_2_0 · ruby/ruby · GitHub". GitHub. Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  4. Gustavo Frederico Temple Pedrosa, Vitor de Lima, Leonardo Bianconi (2015). "Ruby 2.2.1 Released" . Retrieved 12 July 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. Gustavo Frederico Temple Pedrosa, Vitor de Lima, Leonardo Bianconi (2015). "v2.2.1 ChangeLog". Archived from the original on 26 February 2017. Retrieved 12 July 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. Gustavo Frederico Temple Pedrosa, Vitor de Lima, Leonardo Bianconi (2014). "Specifying non volatile registers for increase performance in ppc64" . Retrieved 12 July 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. Gustavo Frederico Temple Pedrosa, Vitor de Lima, Leonardo Bianconi (2014). "Specifying MACRO for increase performance in ppc64" . Retrieved 12 July 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. "Ruby 2.3.0 changes and features". Running with Ruby. dev.mensfeld.pl. 14 November 2015.
  9. "Ruby/NEWS at v.2_3_0 - ruby/ruby". GitHub. Retrieved 25 December 2015.
  10. "Ruby 2.4.0 Released". www.ruby-lang.org. Retrieved 2016-12-30.
  11. "Ruby 2.5.0 Released" . Retrieved 2018-05-02.
  12. "Ruby 2.6.0 Released". Ruby Programming Language. 2018-12-25. Retrieved 2018-12-25.
  13. "Ruby 2.7.0 Released". Ruby Programming Language. 2019-12-25. Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  14. "Ruby 3.0.0 Released". Ruby Programming Language. 2020-12-25. Retrieved 2020-12-25.
  15. "Ruby 3.1.0 Released". Ruby Programming Language. 2021-12-25. Retrieved 2022-12-26.
  16. "Ruby 3.2.0 Released". Ruby Programming Language. 2022-12-25. Retrieved 2022-12-26.
  17. "Ruby 3.3.0 Released". Ruby Programming Language. 2023-12-25. Retrieved 2024-04-29.