Ruby 1.9.3 arrives with licence change

The Ruby development team announced the release of version 1.9.3 of its open source programming language. Described as basically being "an implementation-improved version of Ruby 1.9.2", the first release of the new stable series of Ruby improves library loading performance and brings changes to the Ruby licence.

Ruby 1.9.3 p0 source code is made available under a 2-clause BSD Licence and the Ruby Licence; previous versions of Ruby were released under the GPLv2 and Ruby Licence. Other changes include improved locking in multi-threaded programs, regular expression support for Unicode 6.0 and a new library io/console for simple portable access to the console. Also among the modifications are changes to Random.rand and extra String methods such as prepend and byteslice, though generally, the developers say you should be able to safely switch to Ruby 1.93 from 1.9.2.

The developers note that, on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, users running Xcode 4.1 will need to configure Ruby with '--with-gcc=gcc-4.2', while those using Xcode 4.2 will need to use '--with-gcc=clang'. More details about the stable release can be found in the change log and in the NEWS file.

Ruby 1.9.3 (1.9.3 p0) is available to download from the rubylang.org site.

See also:

• Ruby 2.0 for 2013, a report from The H.
• Ruby creator working on mobile Ruby dialect, a report from The H.

(crve)