Ruby 2.0.0 preview arrives

The first preview of Ruby 2.0.0 has been released for testing and feedback, especially from developers making "2.0 ready" Ruby applications, 2.0 feature proposers and Ruby committers. The preview is incomplete; however, it does include features such as refinements (to make "monkey-patching" safer), keyword arguments, lazy enumerators, support for the literal %i for symbolic arrays, addition of a convention that #to_h methods return Hashes and a new regexp engine. Mat Sadler, engineer at UK Globaldev, has a summary of the new features and examples in a blog posting.

What is omitted, though, is DTrace support, updated RubyGems, Rdoc and Rake and a number of other accepted but not implemented features such as an easier embedding API for Ruby and support for passing of Unicode. These are expected in early December's Preview 2. At around Christmas, a code freeze will take place and around New Year, the first release candidate should appear. By early February a second release candidate should open the path to a final release on 24 February. Further details of the changes are available from the NEWS file within the source code distribution. Heroku, the Ruby application hosting service that has sponsored the work of Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, Koichi Sasada and Nobuyoshi Nakada on Ruby 2.0, has also made it possible to run the 2.0 preview on their service. Details are available in a blog posting.

(djwm)