JRuby, a veteran among languages other than Java riding atop the JVM, will be upgraded Wednesday with the release of JRuby 9000.
Available for download at the JRuby website, JRuby 9000, "is going to [have] a lot of potential to increase the performance of Ruby," said project co-lead Charles Oliver Nutter. "JRuby in general brings true threading, true parallelism to Ruby and everything the JVM has to offer for the Ruby world."
Better performance in the new version is achieved by a rewritten compiler that serves as more of a classic, optimizing compiler. "Before, it was more of a direct translation from Ruby byte code into JVM byte code without a lot of optimization," said Nutter. Subsystems like IO and process management now use the same native functionality as the C-based version of Ruby, improving compatibility with standard Posix and Unix behavior, according to a GitHub page detailing the upgrade.