October 31st 2011 By Dr Nic Williams

Ruby 1.9.3 Alpha Available

There is nothing scary or ghoulish on this Halloween Day in our latest product update. Far from it! MRI (Matz’s Ruby Implementation) 1.9.3 was released yesterday. Today we’re happy to make it immediately available on Engine Yard Cloud and Engine Yard Managed for alpha testing.

What’s new in MRI 1.9.3 for your web app?

Since 1.9.2, a speed race was kicked off by a patch from Xavier Shay. Later, a different patch was committed to the main trunk of MRI, which is now available in 1.9.3, by Masaya Tarui. Peter Cooper reported that there are some performance differences between Masaya's patch and Xavier's for larger apps, so we can expect that battle for faster performance to continue in the 2.0.0 work! Another production performance improvement to 1.9.3 is the change of the Garbage Collector to lazy sweep (see [InfoQ interview](http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/ruby193-gc)). The focus is improved management of short lived objects.

Is 1.9.3 supported or just available for testing?

When we first release new stack items or major stack upgrades, we make them available as an alpha release. You request access, you give us a good story about why you want to test a new feature, and we turn some secret dials. Presto! You have Ruby 1.9.3 access on your account(s). That is, it’s initially available to you for testing. We expect 1.9.3p0 to be a rock solid piece of machinery. Nevertheless, we will monitor it for public bugs and patches, and may also patch it directly ourselves between MRI Core patch releases.

Who is using Ruby 1.9.3?

Us, for one. We use all the Rubies within our internal and public services. The main Engine Yard Cloud web app was recently migrated to Ruby 1.9.2; and will be upgraded to Ruby 1.9.3 shortly. Looking forward to seeing the GC improvements in action.

If everything looks good, we’ll move through to beta and the general availability (that is, supported) as soon as possible.

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