From: Chuck Remes <cremes.devlist@...>
Date: 2010-11-24T06:25:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8 vs 1.9


On Nov 23, 2010, at 9:43 AM, Peter Pincus wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> how much longer will Ruby 1.8(.7) be maintained ? Is it advisable to
> dive into 1.9(.2) ? What are the immediate advantages of using 1.9
> over 1.8 ?

I believe the guys at EngineYard are in charge of backporting fixes to the 1.8.7 branch. I also heard there was a 1.8.8 coming at some point to be the final release in the 1.8 series.

I use 1.9.2p0 daily and find it to be extremely stable and fast. I would say the biggest reason to use it is to get a performance boost. Most of your code from 1.8 will "just work."  My code sees a 2-5x speedup on 1.9.2 versus 1.8.7.

Why not try it on your code and see for yourself? With tools like rvm (for unix) and pik (for windows) it's a breeze to have multiple rubies installed simultaneously.

cr