Posted by naruse on 12 Dec 2016

We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 2.4.0-rc1.

Ruby 2.4.0-rc1 is the first release candidate of Ruby 2.4.0. This rc1 is released to get feedback from the community. Feel free to send feedback since you can still fix the features.

Improve the internal structure of hash table (st_table) by introducing open addressing and an inclusion order array. This improvement has been discussed with many people, especially with Yura Sokolov.

Binding#irb: Start a REPL session similar to binding.pry

While you are debugging, you may often use p to see the value of variables. With pry you can use binding.pry in your application to launch a REPL and run any Ruby code. r56624 introduces binding.irb which behaves like that with irb.

Though ISO/IEC 30170:2012 doesn’t specify details of the Integer class, Ruby had two visible Integer classes: Fixnum and Bignum. Ruby 2.4 unifies them into Integer. All C extensions which touch the Fixnum or Bignum class need to be fixed.

See also the ticket and akr’s slides.

String/Symbol#upcase/downcase/swapcase/capitalize(!) now handle Unicode case mappings instead of only ASCII case mappings.

Performance improvements

Ruby 2.4 also contains the following performance improvements including language changes:

[x, y].max and [x, y].min are optimized to not create a temporary array under certain conditions.

Added Regexp#match? , which executes a regexp match without creating a back reference object and changing $~ to reduce object allocation.

Other performance improvements

Debugging

Ruby ignores exceptions in threads unless another thread explicitly joins them. With report_on_exception = true , you can notice if a thread has died due to an unhandled exception.

Send us feedback what should be the default for report_on_exception and about report-on-GC, which shows a report when a thread is garbage collected without join.

Ruby has deadlock detection around waiting threads, but its report doesn’t include enough information for debugging. Ruby 2.4’s deadlock detection shows threads with their backtrace and dependent threads.

Try and enjoy programming with Ruby 2.4.0-rc1, and send us feedback!

Other notable changes since 2.3

Support OpenSSL 1.1.0 (drop support for 0.9.7 or prior)

ext/tk is now removed from stdlib Feature #8539

XMLRPC is now removed from stdlib Feature #12160

See NEWS or commit logs for details.

With those changes, 2519 files changed, 288606 insertions(+), 83896 deletions(-) since Ruby 2.3.0!

Download

https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.4/ruby-2.4.0-rc1.tar.bz2 SIZE: 12512729 bytes SHA1: a0439652a97a2406b691e8a1e586e2cf08c258ba SHA256: 3b156b20f9df0dd62cbeeb8e57e66ea872d2a5b55fabdef1889650122bcc2ea7 SHA512: b43902ac7794487197df55a45256819d2e7540b77f1ed4eb68def3e0473ee98860a400862075bafadbde74f242e1dfe36a18cd6fe05ac42aae1ea6dddc9978ce

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https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.4/ruby-2.4.0-rc1.zip SIZE: 15785968 bytes SHA1: 7d82386434ccbb1701f2995286bf29c8b9179e01 SHA256: 14e6910e36618cddffeb22bad5f1052f907dc31ec93d4aa945bca0905d8a52c4 SHA512: 5dd89320d429e5bd5faf3709be7e5b70f7355304d6324d7ac13a69187e5f1446ad5988c8186bc33f4fea8934288294f9d16fea173f39b2b39967746c4b03d1d4

Release Comment

See also the release schedule and other information:

ReleaseEngineering24