Ruby 1.9.2 RC1 Released; Final Release Due In August

By Peter Cooper

Ruby 1.9.2 RC1 has just been released. This is a release candidate of Ruby 1.9.2. Ruby 1.9.2 will be mostly compatible with 1.9.1, except the following changes: Many new methods

New socket API (IPv6 support)

New encodings

Random class that supports various random number generators

Time is reimplemented. There is no longer the year 2038 problem.

some regexp enhancements

$: no longer includes the current directory.

dl is reimplemented on top of libffi.

new psych library that wraps libyaml. You can use the library instead of syck.

Yuki (Yugui) Sonoda

Ruby 1.9.2's been slowly progressing through preview releases for a while now, so it's great to see it ramping up for a final production release in August. You can read Yugui's post here or see the NEWS file for RC1 which lists the changes from Ruby 1.9.1.

1.9.2 RC1 can be installed with one of the official archives or, more easily, with Wayne E Seguin's popular RVM tool. If you already have RVM installed, it's as simple as:

rvm update --head rvm reload rvm install 1.9.2

Don't go rushing to deploy this on all your production boxes just yet, though, and when you do, test all of your libraries against it. Segfaults have been quite common on the 1.9.2 previews with some libraries. I'm still sitting on Ruby 1.9.1p378 in production because it seems to be the most stable 1.9 release to date.