This is the second part of InfoQ's RubyKaigi 2008 coverage, for the first part, see the discussion with Matz.

Ruby Standardization



Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto expressed his intention to standardize Ruby. The aims of the standardization are to improve the compatibility between different Ruby implementations like JRuby and IronRuby and to ease Ruby's way into the Japanese government, which in 2007 announced guidelines to use open standards rather than specific products. Matz plans to hand in the standard to the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), however, a concrete date has not yet been determined—only that it will "at least take a couple of years for standardization".

Ruby 1.9x Roadmap

On the second day of the conference, Koichi Sasada—the developer of YARV—unveiled the roadmap for Ruby 1.9x and announced his plans to release the stable version 1.9.1 by Christmas 2008. The currently available Ruby 1.9.0 was always intended to be a development release, whereas 1.9.1 is planned to be the first stable release from the 1.9 series, and therefore to be used in production. On the same day, the updated versions 1.9.0-2, 1.8.7-p22, 1.8.6-p230, and 1.8.5-p231 were released too.

The roadmap for 1.9 is shown below:

Jul 25 1.9.0-3

Aug 25 1.9.0-4

Sep 25 1.9.0-5 (feature freeze)

Oct 25 1.9.0-6 (1.9.1 RC1)

Nov 25 1.9.0-7 (1.9.1 RC2)

Dec 20 1.9.1

The Next Ruby

Koichi Sasada also talked about possible features that might get implemented in future versions of Ruby.