Ruby 2.0 feature freeze - heads for February release

The Ruby developers have declared the feature set of Ruby 2.0 frozen; no further features will be accepted for the next version of the programming language from this point onwards. Ruby developer and 2.0 release manager Yusuke Endoh, who laid out the original release plan, added that he is now planning a feature preview of Ruby 2.0 for the end of the October and a final official release is still set for 24 February 2013, keeping to the schedule that was announced in October 2011. Before then, a "code freeze" milestone is expected to be reached near the end of this year.

Although the length of the Ruby 2.0 feature list in the roadmap is not insignificant, Ruby creator Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto has said in the past that the changes are "rather small. Smaller than the ones we made in 1.9". Changes to the language include support for named arguments (as an optional argument hash) and refinements (making "monkey patching" of existing classes safer). It is reported that a change in how respond_to? handles protected methods is probably the change most likely to break existing code. The Ruby VM should see a number of performance improvements thanks to work on optimising the byte code and the addition of support for DTrace probes and better Ruby tracing.

(djwm)