RubyFlow The Ruby and Rails community linklog

Draft Ruby Specification published

This is very big news…a specification will really bring some legitimacy to the language. The draft is here.

Comments

It’s based on 1.8.7…which effectively turns back time :(

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969623

No, it dosn’t effectively turn back time: “Second, we intend that existing implementations such as Ruby 1.8.7, Ruby 1.8.6, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, and IronRuby can conform to the specification without modifying them.”.

It is being pragmatic, and attempting to standardize the parts of the language that are generic across multiple existing versions. It’s a starting points. It’s miles better than not having a standard at all, and a second version can expand on that.

MRI 1.9 is ruby/Ruby as far as I am concerned.

In January it will be a year since 1.9.1 was released and I for one am not going to provide 1.8 library support forever while I wait for experimental ruby implementations and developers to catch up.

I’m not saying the MRI alternatives aren’t useful to some but at what cost if library developers doing the real grunt work can’t use the features being asked for and implemented in MRI?

Personally I’m still mostly using 1.8.6, and have so far not had any compelling reason to move to 1.9.

I might move to 1.9 if a library I absolutely depend on drop 1.8.x support and adds a feature I “must” have, but I can’t think of any library that’d justify that at present. 1.9.x isn’t mature enough and doesn’t offer sufficient enough incremental improvements for some of us to be worth having to re-test a bunch of code for, and so it will stay around for a long time. This is good - it shows a level of maturity when people don’t any more feel a need to chase the bleeding edge in order to get the features they want/need because what we have is mostly good enough.

For most libraries, if they go 1.9.x only, I just won’t upgrade yet, or I’ll fork or find alternative libraries to meet my needs.

Even more so, I find getting a Ruby eco-system where multiple implementations are given a real chance of catching up and come into widespread use far more compelling and important than starting to use 1.9 features. Of course, one of my pet projects is implementing a Ruby compiler, so I have a strong interest in a Ruby standard being established, as it makes it far easier than having to try to be “bug compatible” with MRI.

Eventually I’ll probably take the 1.9.x plunge, but most likely it will be for a single new project, and I’d be very careful about using 1.9.x only features. And I might just wait until there are more new features and the switch becomes more compelling.

Another call for 1.9: Joe Fiorini

what the fuck is this shit.

Ruby 1.9.1-p376 is released (07 Dec 2009)

I think C++ is better then Ruby

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