Ruby 3.4, and some sad news

#​732 — December 28, 2024

Read on the Web

🎄 Hi folks. We're not back properly till January 9, 2025, but with Ruby getting its traditional big Christmas Day release, I wanted to drop in and say hi. Sadly, there's also some tragic news I need to share at the end of the issue (consider this a content warning if you need to).
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Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team

Ruby Weekly

Ruby 3.4 Released— It wouldn’t be Christmas without a major Ruby release and this year delivers Ruby 3.4 complete with a variety of improvements and updates:

• You can now use it to refer to an unnamed block parameter (a la _1).
• Prism has become the default Ruby parser.
• Ruby's Socket now performs IPv6 and IPv4 name resolution concurrently – an approach with the quirky name of Happy Eyeballs Version 2 (RFC 8305).
• YJIT's performance and reliability continue to improve.
• There's initial support for modular garbage collection, allowing you to load in alternative GC implementations via an environment variable.
• String literals in files without a frozen_string_literal comment emit a deprecation warning when mutated.
• And.. much more! We look forward to digging deeper in 2025.

Yui Naruse

💡 Note that due to a quirk in the Ruby 3.4.0 release, Ruby 3.4.1 followed shortly thereafter to tidy things up, so that's the version you should be installing.

RIP Noah Gibbs

On Boxing Day, Nate Berkopec shared the tragic news that Rubyist Noah Gibbs passed away at some time over the past couple of weeks.

Many of you will be familiar with Noah through his work on YJIT at Shopify (he was on the team that ported YJIT to Rust), as well as Rebuilding Rails, his talks at many Ruby events, and his in-depth blog posts about Ruby performance.

Noah's wife requests that if you have any stories about Noah that you submit them via this form so his family and children can learn more about him and his work in ways that they might have not been aware of. His wife has also suggested it would be nice if there could be a scholarship or similar program in his name at future Ruby conferences, as his passion in life was helping people learn.

Our thoughts go out to his friends and family at this time. His work and presence has benefitted all of us as Rubyists and he will be sorely missed.

🎄 We'll see you again in full on Thursday, January 9, 2025.