Ruby 2.1.0 preview1 released

https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/4417257

by obilgic • 13 years ago

146 59 13 years ago

ruby-forum.com

forlorn2• 13 years ago

Is there more detailed changes description?

forlorn2• 13 years ago

Closed tickets in bugtracker:

http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-trunk/issues?set_fil...

mmanfrin• 13 years ago

From the link:

The notable changes are:

* VM (method cache)

* RGenGC

* refinements

* syntax

* Decimal Literal

* Frozen String Literal

* def's return value

* Bignum

* 128bit

* GMP

* String#scrub

* Socket.getifaddrs

* new Rubygem

riffraff2• 13 years ago

I think def's return value means returning symbol rather than nil? I've been waiting for it for ten years, I had almost forgotten why I wanted it in the first place :)

_anshulk• 13 years ago

So, this would mean that

private def foo

end

will now work?

charlysisto• 13 years ago

Please tell us, what's the use case ?

bradgessler• 13 years ago

Could somebody elaborate on "new Rubygem"?

I remember reading a while back that Ruby was going to make an effort to separate stdlib components from the language, which I think is pretty exciting.

The more boring side of this would be a newer version of RubyGems.

gnufied• 13 years ago

Changelog just means newer version of Rubygems, but with following new features:

1. Rubygems now has a dependency resolution mechanism similar to Bundler.

2. Rubygems has something called StubSpecification which means that complete gemspec of all the gems need not be loaded when using rubygems now. The idea is, we just need dependency from gemspec. Author name, URL etc are irrelevant details which used to get loaded before. So this should make it bit lightweight.

drakaal• 13 years ago

Non-Blocking IO with out raising an exception is a notable new feature. The Improvements to Garbage Collection is also pretty huge.

The 128bit number support is cool, I mean if you want to work with Quadruple-precision floating-point numbers... I know I do.

topac• 13 years ago

Where do you find out about the non-blocking io?

MrBra2• 13 years ago

I suppose he refers to this...

* IO

  * extended methods:

    * IO#seek supports SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE as whence.

    * IO#seek accepts symbols (:CUR, :END, :SET, :DATA, :HOLE) for 2nd argument.

    * IO#read_nonblock accepts optional `exception: false` to return symbols

    * IO#write_nonblock accepts optional `exception: false` to return symbols

see https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/v2_1_0_preview1/NEWS

singularity2001• 13 years ago

List of new features: http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-trunk/issues?set_fil...

twelvechairs• 13 years ago

I'm still waiting (4 years now) for method#to_source. sigh

http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/2080

ksec2• 13 years ago

It changed from 2.0.0 to next minor. And this is 2.1 already.

What is the course of this delay?

steveklabnik4• 13 years ago

What is the course of this delay?

Is there a patch?

transfire7• 13 years ago

Ha! I have you beat! I've been waiting 7 years for to be able override autoload's require.

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7716

In fact, after 10 years of dedication, b/c of this and a few other issues (and attitudes) I don't use Ruby any more.

virtualwhys4• 13 years ago

What language(s) did you move on to?

lectrick2• 13 years ago

Autoload is fundamentally broken because it makes your app state nondeterministic by making state loading and logic interdependent.

I work on a large Ruby software project and we've had to move away from any autoload except for very specific cases for this reason- troubleshooting autoload bugs are the WORST.

Maybe this is the reason it hasn't been looked at.

MrBra2• 13 years ago

What have you used Ruby for in these 10 years?

lectrick2• 13 years ago

How about method(:methodname) returning the actual method object instead of a newly instantiated wrapper class containing the method metadata?

zimbatm• 13 years ago

    irb(main):001:0> RUBY_VERSION
    => "2.0.0"
    irb(main):002:0> class Foo; def hello; puts "hello"; end; end
    => nil
    irb(main):003:0> X = Foo.new.method(:hello)
    => #<Method: Foo#hello>
    irb(main):004:0> X.class
    => Method
    irb(main):005:0> class Bar; define_method(:hello, &X); end
    => #<Proc:0x007f93d087a2d8 (lambda)>
    irb(main):006:0> Bar.new.hello
    hello
    => nil

cronin101• 13 years ago

I feel your pain, I (part)implemented a lambda parser that will spit out C-style expressions when given basic mathematical ruby expressions if that helps you: https://github.com/cronin101/HaDope/blob/master/lib/parsing/...

E.g. calling with ->(i){ i * (2 + i / 4) } returns 'x * (2 + (x / 4))'

dkubb• 13 years ago

It's not perfect, but I've used sourcify [1] to get Proc#to_source. I would much rather see this built into ruby itself, since there are a bunch of tools I would build with it available, but this works fairly well in practice.

[1] https://github.com/ngty/sourcify

cheald• 13 years ago

For what it's worth, if you're just looking to get at the innards of a method, Pry does this job admirably.

https://gist.github.com/cheald/6674718

https://github.com/pry/pry/wiki/Source-browsing

Or to get the source as a string:

    > require 'pry'
    > Nokogiri.method(:HTML).source
      => "    def HTML thing, url = nil, encoding = nil, options = XML::ParseOptions::DEFAULT_HTML, &block\n      Nokogiri::HTML::Document.parse(thing, url, encoding, options, &block)\n    end\n"

VeejayRampay2• 13 years ago

Pry is awesome. You can even navigate your source shell-style and do all sorts of fancy things with it. Great little gem.

MartinMond2• 13 years ago

So what happened to refinements? They were given a warning in 2.0 because the other implementations warned that implementing refinements would lead to worse performance. Has that been fixed?

MartinMond2• 13 years ago

@headius was so kind to answer my question on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSch/status/382065119515398144

ksec2• 13 years ago

Time for some Benchmarks. Ruby 2.1, JRuby 1.7.5 and the Duke Nukeum Rubinius 2.0.

jeltz2• 13 years ago

A list of language and library changes in this release. It does not include some things like the GC and method cache changes.

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/v2_1_0_preview1/NEWS

saurabhnanda2• 13 years ago

Wasn't there an overwhelming negative feedback for refinements? What was the rationale for still going ahead with them?

regularfry3• 13 years ago

Matz has said we're getting them, so we're getting them.

saurabhnanda2• 13 years ago

Sure, he's the benevolent dictator (and the creator of language, itself), but he would've explained himself somewhere. About the benefits of refinements and how to deal with the downsides. Any links?

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

Wasn't there an overwhelming negative feedback for refinements?

IIRC, there were concerns about the performance impact and maybe some other issues of the semantics of refinements -- particularly from maintainers of other Ruby implementations -- which is why there were originally marked "experimental". I believe that those have been addressed with input from the other implementors in 2.1.0.

steveklabnik4• 13 years ago

Even then, a lot of us think the feature is absolutely terrible, performance was just one of the worst parts.

saidajigumi2• 13 years ago

I really wish that Ruby had an actual language reference instead of just the core and stdlib docs. If those same docs were versioned and updated along with the code, then changes in the language would have docs changes that could be linked together into a "What's New" section. Decent basic tutorial material wouldn't hurt either.

This is an area where so many other languages like Python[1], Go[2], etc. get it right. The only semblance of an online language reference is a version of the Pickaxe book that was already out of date back when Rails was a screaming v1.0 newborn.

[1] Python language ref: http://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html

[2] Go language ref: http://golang.org/ref/spec

steveklabnik4• 13 years ago

There is an ISO standard for 1.8.7 and RubySpec for all versions.

VeejayRampay2• 13 years ago

Though 1.8.7 was released more than 5 years ago (and the language has evolved a lot since then) and the RubySpec are usually not up to date, at least not documenting all the features as they come in (as Brian Ford and others have pointed out several times).

Not to be an ungrateful d*ck, I think the progress made is fantastic and supported by a bunch of extremely dedicated, talented and courageous people, but there is something of a void in terms of Ruby-as-formally-specified-language, hard to deny. But as usual, I guess it's hard to find the manpower, the time and the money to support such efforts.

saidajigumi2• 13 years ago

Not to be rude, but 1.8.7 is dead. RubySpec is first, not linked from [1] and second, just about completely inaccessible to someone not already familiar with Ruby. It's an executable specification, not a language reference manual. It's aims, structure, and information architecture are inappropriate for the purposes of a human with questions about the language, ala "what's the syntax and semantics for X in Ruby 2.0?" (for X = case, method definition, etc., etc.)

We're already starting to see third-party sources bitrotting. E.g. eigenclass' 1.9 pages are now gone. Without an authoritative source for "What's new in 1.9.x?" and later, this bitrot will get worse and make it needlessly painful for folks who still need to move 1.8 code (or brains...) to 1.9/2.0.

Part of my point is that the sources directly linked from ruby-lang.org are a mish-mash as well. There's virtually nothing authoritative, maintained by ruby-lang.org itself. The links at [1] are a mix of ok, good, and rather out of date. ruby-doc.org, not linked from [1] (wat.), is about as good as we've got for a standard reference. Sadly, it's missing the language reference piece and it's auto-generated information architecture sucks hard.

An example of that last point: hit [2]. What's above the fold? A useless list of files. Scroll down and you'll eventually get to the filterable lists of core classes and methods. Click on "Array"[3] and we actually get a nice summary doc with examples that walks us through this class.

For comparison, we'll go to the standard library[4]. Click on "net/http" in the left sidebar[5]. Instead of getting a nice summary page, instead we get an opaque class and method list. The reader is left to divine which, if any, link might provide some clues about the use and organization of this library. (Hint: it's "Net::HTTP", third from the top on the left.) If you already know which is the "main" class for this library, then you can usually guess right.

It's ridiculous for reference material to assume the user is already familiar with it in order to successfully navigate it. Again, other languages' library references do a much better job w.r.t. navigability.

Coda: I don't mean to harsh on ruby-doc.org too much; it's just a central example in the Ruby world. Nevertheless I feel the need to highlight how the Ruby community's disconnected, scattershot approach to documentation presents both a user education and a marketing problem.

[1] https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/

[2] http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0.0/

[3] http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0.0/Array.html

[4] http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/

[5] http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/net/http/rdoc/index....

Ruby 2.1.0 preview1 released

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