Ruby-in-Ruby Rubinius 1.1 released

The Rubinius developers have released version 1.1 of Rubinius, an implementation of the Ruby language written, predominantly, in Ruby. The implementers have written both the majority of the core classes and a Ruby-to-bytecode compiler, in Ruby. The bytecode generated by the compiler is run on a bytecode virtual machine written in C++ which uses LLVM to compile the bytecode in to native machine code. This compilation process gives Rubinius higher performance than the traditional Ruby interpreter.

The BSD licensed release 1.1 is the first feature since May's release of 1.0, and includes performance improvements, better Ruby compatibility and bug fixes. The new features include, JIT block in-lining and a new GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) algorithm for better performance and reliability, support for dbm, sdbm and gdbm extensions and bad extension detection. A full list of new features and fixes is available in the 1.1 announcement.

Rubinius 1.1 is available to download from the Rubini.us web site as a source code archive or as binary installers for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6; a Git repository is also available for cloning.

(djwm)