Among the smattering of new methods and bug fixes the most important improvement in Ruby 1.9.3 release, for Rails users, is going to be in application boot time. I’ve seen at least 50% performance boosts in load time simply by upgrading from Ruby 1.9.2. The installation was painless although I had some issues compiling the ffi gem extensions. I can’t wait to migrate production code over to this new version and development is going to be so much more of a pleasure.

To upgrade with RVM:

rvm get head
rvm reload
rvm install 1.9.3

You can read the news post or changelog for additional details.

In particular I found the following of interest.

  • Random.rand now accepts a range as an argument Random.rand(10..20).
  • IO.write and IO.binwrite for writing to files in normal and binary mode.
  • New Encodings including UTF-16 and UTF-32.
  • ARGF new methods like ARGF.write and ARGF.puts.

Enjoy!