Ruby 3.1 places a heavy emphasis on enhancing the development process as well as the final product’s performance. Find out what’s new in the most recent Ruby release!
Ruby 3.1, the most recent version, was published on December 25th, 2021. It has a lot of new features and improvements in terms of performance. For the latest release, almost 3000 files were updated. We’ll go over the improvements made by Ruby 3.1 and what they signify for the development process and how apps work in this article. The new version is backward compatible with Ruby 3.0, which was released a year ago. Ruby on Rails has seen a rebirth since then. A new Rails version — Rails 7.0 – was released at the end of 2021, a few days before Ruby 3.1 was released. The improvements that were delivered helped to improve app security, maintenance, and development costs, and app performance and user experience. Check out our blog post on the release notes for Rails 7.0 if you’re also interested in the latest Rails version.
Increased efficiency
YJIT, a new in-process JIT compiler, is included in Ruby 3.1. It boosts the performance of apps built with the Ruby on Rails framework, in particular. The improvement in performance is significant: Shopify’s developers who designed YJIT were able to increase it from 22% to 39%.
The most noticeable change made with Ruby 3.1 is enhanced performance, as the previous compiler, named MJIT, was deployed in Ruby 2.6 in 2018 but did not improve the speed of real-world business applications. Please keep in mind that YJIT is still a beta function. As a result, it’s turned off by default.
Ruby 3.1 Features
Apart from the new compiler, Ruby 3.1 includes a number of other enhancements aimed at improving efficiency and adding new functionality. First and foremost, as a powerful alternative to the standard library, the new, entirely redesigned debugger library was introduced. The revised debugger is as follows:
- Supports remote debugging, which makes debugging easier when the Ruby application is running as a daemon or using Docker.
- Improves debugging performance: if no breakpoints are used in the code, the library does not slow down the application.
- Thanks to the new colourful interface, it provides a better user experience.
- By integrating with Visual Studio Code and Google Chrome, it adds support for a comprehensive debugging frontend.
Also, thanks to a new built-in library, backtracking output when an error occurs is now easier:
- It not only reveals which line of code caused the issue, but also which part of the code caused the error.
- Although the library’s output can be adjusted, the API is still in the experimental phase and may be updated in the future.
- By default, the library is turned on.
The interactive Ruby console now includes documentation and autocomplete as standard features. That is to say:
- The autocomplete dialogue recommends the name of the function you can use in the current context each time you type the code.
- If the documentation is installed, a portion of it is displayed alongside the autocompletion box. You may read the entire documentation by hitting Alt+d.
What was new in Ruby 3.1?
Apart from the aforementioned new features, the new edition also included a number of significant enhancements, such as:
- In one-line pattern matching, parentheses are no longer required.
- The expression can now be used as an argument to the pin operator ().
- Both Hash literals and keywords can have their values omitted.
- The RBS language, which is used to describe the structure of Ruby applications, has received numerous bug fixes, speed enhancements, and other updates, including support for generic type aliases and a new RBS collection feature for managing the RBSs of other gems.
Summing up
Ruby 3.1 is primarily concerned with enhancing app and development performance, and it has shown to be effective for both existing and new product teams. Our experts can assist you in guaranteeing your app’s top speed, security, and scalability by upgrading to the latest features of Ruby on Rails.
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