# \[ANN\] RedCloth 4.0.0 -- Total rewrite - less buggy - 40x fas **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [July 24, 2008, 10:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-redcloth-4-0-0-total-rewrite-less-buggy-40x-fas/144055 "2008-07-24T22:35:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jasongarber](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/977dab/32.png) [@jasongarber](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jasongarber)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2008, 10:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-redcloth-4-0-0-total-rewrite-less-buggy-40x-fas/144055/1 "2008-07-24T22:35:02Z")
I sent this message to the list early Tuesday morning, but it never showed up. Here’s hoping a post to Ruby Forum fares better… RedCloth 4.0 is out. The highlights: - It brings Ruby Textile processing more in line with Textile 2, so no more Markdown support (there are other libraries for that). There are a number of new Textile 2 modifiers supported and line breaks behave the way they should in Textile. Output (less trivial whitespace) is identical to Textile 2 except a few cases where the RedCloth way was preferable. - It’s a C extension, generated with Ragel (the same finite-state-machine juice that powers Mongrel and Hpricot), and it’s 40 times faster than the pure Ruby version was. - It’s less buggy than the previous version, one would hope, with over 500 test cases, including all the examples from the Textile 2 documentation. To install or update your gems: gem install RedCloth Then choose the native Ruby gem or the Win32 binary gem. A few notes: - There may be some confusion about which version of RedCloth your app is running if you had RedCloth 3 installed in your project directly, not using gems. If the old one is found earlier in your LOAD\_PATH, you’re still on RedCloth 3. If in doubt, you can run “RedCloth::VERSION” through your app and it should output “ 4.0.0 ”. - This is a total rewrite–and a major release at that. The old hacks you may have used, both in content (to work around parsing bugs) and in use of the library (to add in custom behavior) may not work. We’ve tried to make it as backward-compatible as possible, but it may take a little adjustment. Such is the price of progress. - As complex as Textile is, there will probably be many bugs in this first version. We’ll handle them and release new versions on a fairly short cycle. _Update:_ 4.0.1 was just released to address some small bugs reported since 4.0 was released on Monday. See the CHANGELOG for details. Thanks go to Why the Lucky Stiff for starting RedCloth and the rewrite and so readily handing the project off when he got involved in Shoes. Thanks also to the many people that downloaded the testing gems or checked out from GitHub and offered their patches. I also appreciate my employer, Eastern Mennonite University, seeing the value in open source software and allowing a few hours hacking time a week so they could have a Textile-powered CMS that really works. Jason G. [http://redcloth.org/](http://redcloth.org/) [http://rubyforge.org/projects/redcloth/](http://rubyforge.org/projects/redcloth/) > **[Commits · jgarber/redcloth](https://github.com/jgarber/redcloth/commits/RELEASE_4_0_0)** > > RedCloth is a Ruby library for converting Textile into HTML. - Commits · jgarber/redcloth [http://jgarber.lighthouseapp.com/projects/13054-redcloth](http://jgarber.lighthouseapp.com/projects/13054-redcloth) ---
**Author:** ![jasongarber](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/977dab/32.png) [@jasongarber](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jasongarber)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2008, 12:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-redcloth-4-0-0-total-rewrite-less-buggy-40x-fas/144055/2 "2008-07-25T00:34:23Z")
Jason G. wrote: > I sent this message to the list early Tuesday morning, but it never > showed up. Here’s hoping a post to Ruby Forum fares better… > > RedCloth 4.0 is out. > … > > - It’s a C extension, generated with Ragel (the same > finite-state-machine juice that powers Mongrel and Hpricot), and it’s 40 > times faster than the pure Ruby version was. This is new, right? So with the addition of a C extension, I guess this won’t work under JRuby until we get the Ragel bits converted. For those using RedCloth under JRuby, feel free to contact us about getting RedCloth 4.0 running, or stick to 3.0 for the time being. (FYI, we’ve already had a couple reports about RedCloth 4.0 not working). - Charlie ---
**Author:** ![jasongarber](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/977dab/32.png) [@jasongarber](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jasongarber)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2008, 1:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-redcloth-4-0-0-total-rewrite-less-buggy-40x-fas/144055/3 "2008-07-25T01:24:18Z")
Jason G. wrote: > I sent this message to the list early Tuesday morning, but it never > showed up. Here’s hoping a post to Ruby Forum fares better… > > - It’s a C extension, generated with Ragel (the same > finite-state-machine juice that powers Mongrel and Hpricot), and it’s 40 > times faster than the pure Ruby version was. Thanks for doing that. I’ve been using the SVN version of this for awhile and it cuts my rendering time for textile blocks from like 0.08 to 0.02. Nice work. Hope it kills all those nasty bugs 3.0.4 had, too. -R ---
**Author:** ![jasongarber](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/977dab/32.png) [@jasongarber](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jasongarber)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2008, 5:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-redcloth-4-0-0-total-rewrite-less-buggy-40x-fas/144055/4 "2008-07-25T17:15:36Z")
Correct. The Ragel bits shouldn’t be too hard to convert from C to Java. My concern is how to keep it DRY. Feel free to fork and restructure. Charles Oliver N. wrote: > This is new, right? So with the addition of a C extension, I guess this > won’t work under JRuby until we get the Ragel bits converted. For those > using RedCloth under JRuby, feel free to contact us about getting > RedCloth 4.0 running, or stick to 3.0 for the time being. > > (FYI, we’ve already had a couple reports about RedCloth 4.0 not > working). > > - Charlie