# Ruby Versions in Common Use (Or, Can we bury 1.8.6 yet?)

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-versions-in-common-use-or-can-we-bury-1-8-6-yet/194032>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [August 28, 2010, 5:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-versions-in-common-use-or-can-we-bury-1-8-6-yet/194032 "2010-08-28T17:22:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/eb8c5e/32.png) [@tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tcsnide)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2010, 5:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-versions-in-common-use-or-can-we-bury-1-8-6-yet/194032/1 "2010-08-28T17:22:27Z")

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I am curious if Ruby 1.8.6 is still widely used? Have most people made  
the jump to 1.8.7 by now?

I ask b/c 1.8.6 lacks support for passing blocks thru blocks, e.g.

lambda { |&b| … }

I realized that sometime over the last year or so I started to using  
the ability of 1.8.7+ to do this without giving it a second thought. I  
do not relish the idea of going back and and making workarounds in my  
code for 1.8.6.

Side note: it really is a shame I think that 1.8.7 wasn’t version 1.9,  
the whole point of having versioned site\_ruby locations (ie. site\_ruby/  
1.8/) seems completely defeated by this, since 1.8.7 differs so much.  
And now I see Ruby 1.9.2 is using site\_ruby/1.9.1 and even provides an  
explanation that it (somehow) makes sense.

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**Author:** ![tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/eb8c5e/32.png) [@tcsnide](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tcsnide)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2010, 5:14am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-versions-in-common-use-or-can-we-bury-1-8-6-yet/194032/2 "2010-08-30T05:14:05Z")

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On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Intransition [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)  
wrote:

> I am curious if Ruby 1.8.6 is still widely used? Have most people made  
> the jump to 1.8.7 by now?

In “Rocking the enterprise with Ruby” at RubyKaigi (30:56):

“one of the issues that we have been working on … we are still stuck  
on 1.8.6 and we are still trying to migrate to 1.8.7 and it has been  
real hard because of our huge codebase”