While Ruby 1.8.x is referred to as the stable branch, it's still being developed. The next version is coming up, and the first preview of Ruby 1.8.7 has just been announced by Akinori Musha. You can see a quick overview of the new features in Ruby 1.8.7 or take a look at a comprehensive list of the changes.
A look at the new features shows a few API changes that were introduced in Ruby 1.9, but have been backported to Ruby 1.8.7:
For everyone testing multiple Ruby versions, we reported about using Multiruby to test Ruby applications on different Ruby versions.
A look at the new features shows a few API changes that were introduced in Ruby 1.9, but have been backported to Ruby 1.8.7:
- Enumerable::Enumerator is a feature of Ruby 1.9 to bring external iterators to Ruby (these come in addition to the internal iteration methods in the Enumerable mixin). Some of the methods in Enumerable have also been updated to behave more like in Ruby 1.9, e.g. returning Enumerators if no blocks are given.
- Object#tap
- Symbol#to_proc
- Process.exec
- etc.
For everyone testing multiple Ruby versions, we reported about using Multiruby to test Ruby applications on different Ruby versions.