Ruby 2.3.0 Released • Hacker News Board

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#21

Post by jballanc » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 2:59 PM UTC

systems wrote: post #17

with the existence of Perl6, Clojure, F#, Rust, Go, and few others ... For someone who doesn’t know Ruby, why learn it today?

For my money, Ruby comes closest to realizing the "promise" of dynamic languages. That is, it's fast to build with when prototyping, flexible when refactoring, reasonably fast enough and not so memory hungry that it can't handle "web scale".

Obviously there are languages that are better in each of these areas, but few that combine so many as well as Ruby. In other words, if you know that you'll be working in a problem domain (e.g. high concurrency) where specific advantages of some other language (e.g. Go/Erlang) are likely to be needed, use that language. If you're just building something, then Ruby's a fine place to start.

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#22

Post by edlebert » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 3:06 PM UTC

I couldn't find any actual examples on how to use the new frozen string literals. Lots of discussion in the link provided, but that's it.

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#23

Post by cageface » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 3:06 PM UTC

systems wrote: post #17

with the existence of Perl6, Clojure, F#, Rust, Go, and few others ... For someone who doesn’t know Ruby, why learn it today?

The Rails ecosystem is mature now, which means you can find an off-the-shelf gem to do just about anything you want. So building things in Rails is very very fast. It's hard to beat for MVP-style development.

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#24

Post by rubiquity » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 3:09 PM UTC

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #14

Ah, YARV finally adds bytecode compilation and loading as an "experimental" feature. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it.

I could see it making deployment faster or nicer. Imagine being able to compile all the byte code for a Rails app locally and just shoving that up instead of waiting on bundling and all that.

Also I think this would make possible hot code upgrades which are cool but probably more work than their worth. Unless you can build smart hooks into background job and web server libraries that only change the byte code in between jobs and requests. Oh the possibilities!

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#25

Post by hopsoft » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 3:11 PM UTC

waylandsmithers wrote: post #15

Interested to see how people start using safe navigation! I personally tend to avoid `try` in Rails in favor of other `nil` handling patterns.

Why? Genuinely curious.

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#26

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 3:14 PM UTC

systems wrote: post #17

with the existence of Perl6, Clojure, F#, Rust, Go, and few others ... For someone who doesn’t know Ruby, why learn it today?

[deleted]

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#27

Post by chrisseaton » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 3:18 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #20

Anyone knows if Ruby has accepted IBM's contribution of JIT for Cruby?? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10715610 And below is the Presentation from Ko1 on compiling Ruby http://rubykaigi.org/2015/presentations/ko1

I don't think that will happen for a while, if it does happen. They haven't even released their patch under a compatible licence yet, or their library as open source, for example.

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#28

Post by chrisseaton » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 3:19 PM UTC

hopsoft wrote: post #25

waylandsmithers wrote: post #15

Interested to see how people start using safe navigation! I personally tend to avoid `try` in Rails in favor of other `nil` handling patterns.

Why? Genuinely curious.

'try' is relatively slow compared to other control logic, as allowing an exception to be thrown involves constructing an exception stack trace. This is slow in all VMs I know. Theoretically you could detect that the trace isn't used and remove it through escape analysis, but this is not easy, or you could do some crazy thing with lazily creating the stack trace, but that's a research project.

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#29

Post by igravious » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 3:38 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #20

Anyone knows if Ruby has accepted IBM's contribution of JIT for Cruby?? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10715610 And below is the Presentation from Ko1 on compiling Ruby http://rubykaigi.org/2015/presentations/ko1

Thanks for reposting this. Wonder why it's not making bigger waves. What are the performance numbers of this thing like? I feel this IBM OMR is a reply to MS opening .Net CLR

Re: Ruby 2.3.0 Released

#30

Post by jrochkind1 » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 4:14 PM UTC

matthewrudy wrote: post #7

This is actually a really great release. `&.` removes the really annoying (and slow) `try`. And I think the string literals freezing is going to solve a lot of problems with memory allocations. Check out this PR for Rails that covered a lot of similar performance problems created by too many string allocations. https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/21057/files I wish Rails 5 could go all in on Ruby 2.3.0 and frozen str…

Keep in mind string literal freezing is still off by default.

I like that they did it this way, give a chance to see if it actually brings performance improvements in real world scenarios before imposing it on all code.