JRuby 0.9.8 released

The JRuby team is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 0.9.8.

Homepage: http://www.jruby.org/
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/

This release has some great improvements:

  • Ruby on Rails support. We have been working hard on getting Rails own
    unit
    tests running and over 98%* of them now run successfully. We feel things
    are
    running well enough to invite Ruby users to kick the tires and help root
    out
    any final issues.
  • Ruby classes can extend concrete/abstract Java classes and override
    methods
  • New Java primitive array syntax
  • Reimplementation of String, Numeric classes, and Array to be more
    correct
    and performant
  • Significant bottlenecks have been identified. In some cases IO is 6.5x
    faster than previous releases. Java included classes are significantly
    faster than in the past.
  • 225 Jira issues resolved since last release

At the beginning of this development cycle we added Nick S. as a
committer
to JRuby. Nick has been a welcome addition to the team.

Special thanks to Marcin Mielżyński for his tireless work in rewriting a
number of core classes to be much more correct and quick. His attention
to
detail has rooted out many corner cases.

The amount of IRC conversations, mailing list threads, bug reports,
patches,
and blog entries in the community has been a great help and our
community is
really making a huge difference in how fast JRuby is improving. The
amount
of progress is really staggering…

-Tom

Thomas E. wrote:

are
running well enough to invite Ruby users to kick the tires and help root
out
any final issues.

We are actively looking for folks with pure-Ruby R. apps (i.e. no
critical extensions) to help test them out on JRuby 0.9.8. I’ve already
heard from a couple folks whose apps started up and “just worked”. We
know things aren’t going to be perfect with Rails support, but it’s
pretty darn close.

Feel free to communicate with me or Tom directly about issues you find,
or even better: join the mailing lists and report issues at jruby.org.

  • Charlie