Ruby 3.1 has been released with improvements including an experimental in-process just in time compiler and a new debugger.

Ruby's creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming. Ruby has gained popularity because in addition to being fun to use, it is useful because of its mix of different programming styles - functional, dynamic and object-oriented.

The main improvement to Ruby 3.1 is its incorporation of YJIT, a new in-process JIT compiler developed by Shopify. The development team says that while Ruby 2.6 introduced MJIT in 2018, the JIT hasn’t benefited real world business applications. Recently Shopify contributed many Ruby improvements to speed up their Rails application, and one of these was the YJIT compiler.

YJIT uses Basic Block Versioning and includes a JIT compiler inside it. With Lazy Basic Block Versioning (LBBV) it first compiles the beginning of a method, and incrementally compiles the rest when the type of arguments and variables are dynamically determined. This achieves both fast warmup time and performance improvements on most real-world software, up to 22% on railsbench, 39% on liquid-render. YJIT is still an experimental feature, and as such, it is disabled by default.

A completely rewritten debugger has also been included, with faster  debugging performance, support for remote debugging and for multi-process/multi-thread debugging. It also adds support for a rich debugging frontend with support for VSCode and Chrome browser. The debugger also adds colorful REPL and extras including a record & replay feature, and a tracing feature.

Ruby 3.1 is available now.

More Information

Ruby Official Site

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