MacRuby is steadily moving ahead, as a status update on the MacRuby-devel list shows. Next to the various improvements, there's now an easy way to try out MacRuby:

Claudio Poli contributed a web application that periodically builds binary installers of MacRuby trunk. It is available here: http://macruby.icoretech.org . Feel free to use this in case you want a simpler way to follow trunk. Please note that these installers won't work on Mac OS versions below 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

MacRuby now has support for Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), the optimized thread pool and queuing support introduced in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The MacRuby GCD support currently allows to queue up tasks for execution on work queues and support for handling timer events on queues, support for other dispatch sources has not been added yet.

GCD was recently open sourced, and the userspace part is already available as a FreeBSD package.

The MacRuby status update also announces that a first release candidate for MacRuby 0.5 is expected any time now, with a final release expected by the end of the year. As a reminder, MacRuby 0.5 will include many of the improvements developed this year, such as the new LLVM based VM, JIT and AOT, the updated threading system that works without the GIL/GVL inherited from the YARV VM, and much more.



.NET users can try out the new IronRuby 0.9.1 which brings bug fixes and a few improvements to performance, details of IronRuby 0.9.1 in the release notes. IronRuby 0.9.1 binaries are available at CodePlex, the source code is at GitHub.



Everyone waiting for a Ruby 1.9.2-shaped christmas present might have to wait a bit longer. Yuki Sonoda announced the delay on the ruby-core list, giving this explanation:

Ruby 1.9.2 must pass [its RubySpec] before release. I believe this makes it clear, what Ruby 1.9 is. And this brings us more compatibility between implementations.

Details will be decided in a meeting of the Ruby developers.

In 1.8.7 news, Evan Phoenix announces:

Thanks to @malafortune, a little elbow grease, and a lot of specs, Rubinius is now largely updated to ruby 1.8.7!

Rubinius is thus joining MRI and JRuby with support for 1.8.7.