JRuby 1.5.0 Released

Wednesday, May 12 2010

The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.5.0.

This development cycle has been our longest cycle yet (nearly 5 months), but it also has the most fixes. It also includes many new notable features (see below). Most of our bug fixes have been more of what we consider fine-tuning, since we keep getting into smaller corner-cases of compatibility for individual Ruby methods. In that sense, we expect if you had a good experience with JRuby 1.4.0 then 1.5.0 will be a no-brainer upgrade. If you haven’t tried JRuby in a while with your application, then please give us another try. Odds are whatever issue you were having before no longer exists!

1.5.0 Highlights:

  • New native access framework designed for performance and better FFI support
  • Native launcher for *NIX platforms
  • Ant support and Rake-Ant integration
  • Better and better support for Windows
  • Multiple performance improvements for Ruby-to-Java calling, improving correctness, memory, and speed.
  • Embedding API improvements based on user input (JSR-223, BSF, RedBridge, etc)
  • Software updates: Ruby 1.8.7 standard library update, RubyGems 1.3.6, RSpec 1.3.0
  • ruby-debug installed by default
  • Many fixes for Rails 3
  • Various improvements to startup time
  • Improved performance for Object#object_id/__id__
  • Reduced memory use for Java class metadata and faster loading of Java classes
  • jar-in-jar support in the classloader
  • The “open4” library now works properly
  • jruby.jit.codeCache=dir to save jitted scripts/methods to disk in a sha1-hashed .class file
  • New logic for interface implementation that produces “real” classes
  • jruby.ji.objectProxyCache to turn off OPC for extra performance
  • JRuby::Synchronized module for making a class and its subclasses 100% synchronized on all calls
  • Miscellaneous perf improvements to core classes and minor improvements in the JIT
  • No more ObjectSpace during IRB
  • Cleaned up maven artifacts
  • Windows Installer fixes for x64 and Windows 7 security
  • Over 1250 commits since JRuby 1.4

We always appreciate community contributions. This cycle we’ve had more help than ever: David Calavera, Stephen Bannasch, Daniel Luz, Ian Dees, Koichiro Ohba, Hongli Lai, Hiroshi Nakamura, Colin Jones, Takeru Sasaki, Roger Pack, Matjaz Gregoric, Joseph LaFata, Frederic Jean, Alex Coles, Lars Westergren