Monday, September 24, 2007

XRuby 0.3.1 released

XRuby 0.3.1 is released today and you can download the latest version here:
http://code.google.com/p/xruby/downloads/list

The major changes in this version are:

1. Ruby standard libraries are now pre-compiled and the compilation results (java bytecode) are shipped as part of the xruby.jar. This makes deployment really easy, as there is one jar file to deal with. Pre-compiled libraries means it isn't necessary to compile these code every time by the user which is helpful to performance.

The size of the final jar may cause some concerns: while the number of ruby stdlib supported by the current version of XRuby is still limited, the size of the compiled stdlib has already reached 2,000 KB (the entire xruby-0.3.1.jar is over 4,000 KB). Maybe we will ship ruby stdlib in a separated jar files in the future.

2. Use annotation and code generation to bind Java level method to Ruby level method. We started to make this change in 0.3.0 and finished it in 0.3.1. It helped us to get rid of lots of redundant code. For more information about this change, please read our last announcement and dreamhead's articles(1, 2) on his blogs (in Chinese).

Thank everyone who has contributed to this release.

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