From: Rick DeNatale Date: 2007-12-28T00:04:33+09:00 Subject: Re: Purpose of Ruby 1.9? On Dec 27, 2007 4:28 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > botp wrote: > > On Dec 27, 2007 7:11 AM, Dave Thomas wrote: > >> On Dec 26, 2007, at 4:53 PM, Rick DeNatale wrote: > >>> I'm a little concerned that some folks are jumping on 1.9 as an > >>> immediate replacement for Ruby 1.8, which it isn't. > >> Me too: > >> http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2007/12/ruby-19right-fo.html > > > > will it be "safe" to say that the baptism of fire for ruby1.9 is > > lettting it run/support rails 2.0.2 without errors? > > > > kind regards -botp > > > > > Well ... *after* it works on RSpec, rcov, flog, heckle, ZenTest, and all > of Ryan Davis' wonderful tools, sure, go ahead and fix Rails. :) Keep in mind that Ruby 1.9 is really a new language, Matz and co decided to release it as a way of driving towards Ruby 2.0 whose version number would more clearly indicate this, but there are changes in 1.9, which are deliberately incompatible with Ruby 1.8. Matz has spent the past few months backing out some of the more radical experimental changes, but there's no guarantee of backward compatibility. So the work to be done is on both sides. Yes, there are, known, and unknown bugs in Ruby 1.9 which will be worked out by the core team, but on the other side, work needs to be done by all those tools and frameworks to 'port' to the new language. The new and removed language features of 1.9 are not likely to change unless something comes up which indicates a major mistake in the definition of Ruby 1.9. It's a community project. On the whole, I think that this is a good thing, Ruby 1.9 gives the community a stepping stone on the path to Ruby 2.0. I'd hate to see Ruby suffer the fate of, say PHP, which has had some difficulties in getting it's community to move to the latest version of the language. Some of us have been keeping an eye on the evolution of 1.9 for some time before 1.9.0 we've been the scouts, with 1.9.0 we're starting to see more early adopters, or pioneers, start the journey to Ruby 2.0. The danger is unwitting pioneers won't have gotten the message about the role of 1.9 in relation to 1.8 (and 2.0) and will load up their Conestoga wagons without realizing the real possibility of getting arrows in their back. What concerns me is that I'm seeing postings from folks, not only here, but places like the Textmate mailing list, who have installed Ruby 1.9 from source, and found that existing code using, and expecting the ruby command to map to Ruby 1.8 is breaking. I posted a suggestion to ruby-core that perhaps the Ruby 1.9 tarball should be set up so that BY DEFAULT, it installs as ruby1.9 instead of ruby, so that unwitting installers don't get their Ruby1.8 installation replaced by default. -- Rick DeNatale My blog on Ruby http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/