The Workshop

Only a bit more than 1 month ago I’ve blogged about another update of Ruby Enterprise Edition. Now it is time for another heads up:

Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6-20090113 is released.

Man, these guys are on fire! If yo are as crazy as I am, you may already been thinking about an update (at least on your development server.) So, let’s see what you can get if you update to this release.

• Tcmalloc support for 64-bit operating systems (which basically means an improved memory allocator that REE now includes on 64 bit systems).
• Ported and incorporated RubyProf GC patches (what you can use in a lot of debugging scenarios to measure the number of objects in memory).
• Improved documentation (which is obviously a required part if you want to know how to get the most out of this version of Ruby).
• More various fixes and patches, thanks to the reports from the community via the REE Google Groups page.(I encourage you to join so you will get notifications about updates and you can always ask other developers if you are having problems. It’s a helpful community.)

Please refer to the official announcement for a complete list of changes, additions and fixes.

So, this is another great update again just like the previous one. What I may have left out from my previous post is the way Phusion deals with time-cost and development balancing:

Obviously, maintaining an open source product is most of the time kinda expensive since most of the time you are not getting paid directly by the end users. However, what makes this satisfying and interesting is when people who need certain features and improvements, they can sponsor them. Ruby Enterprise Edition is a sponsored product, this update was sponsored too, just like the previous version. Developers get paid, people get the exact features they want, and the whole community benefits from this since paid updates make into the public versions. Pretty clever and neat business model this is. If you are using this product and want to support the development, please donate as some of us already did it.

Looking at the big picture it seems like Phusion keeps improving and updating their product which is already a production ready competitor to the more prevalent Ruby VMs (such as the official version of Ruby or JRuby), mainly because of its substantial performance. Also, if The New York Times, Shopify, and even 37signals use it, they can’t be wrong.