The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.6.0.RC1.

JRuby 1.6.0.RC1 is the first release candidate of JRuby 1.6.0.

JRuby 1.6.0 is the largest release of JRuby to date. This release fixes hundreds of user issues and brings compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 to a very high level. We have made Windows a primary supported platform by adding it as a continuous integration platform, and JRuby 1.6 will provide Windows-based Ruby users with the best experience yet. This release integrates experimental support for C extensions based on Ruby’s C API. And as with all major releases, we have improved stability and performance across the board in response to real-world user input.

We encourage Ruby and JRuby users alike to test out 1.6.0.RC1 to help us shake out remaining issues. It would be especially helpful if users would test out 1.9 mode (by passing –1.9 flag) to help us round out our 1.9.2 compatibility before the final 1.6.0 release.

Major Features: