Table of contents

Ruby is a popular programming language used for web development, scripting, and more. Like any software, Ruby goes through updates and new versions.

Getting New Ruby Versions

The official source for downloading new Ruby versions is the Ruby website (ruby-lang.org). Specifically, you can go to the Downloads page at https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/ to get the latest stable release of Ruby.
On this page, you'll find links to download Ruby installers for different operating systems like Windows, macOS, and various Linux distributions. You can choose the appropriate installer for your system.

Viewing Changes for Each Version

The Ruby core team maintains detailed release notes for every new Ruby version, documenting the changes, improvements, and new features. You can find these release notes on the Ruby website's News page: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/

For example, here are the release notes for Ruby 3.3.3, which was released in June 2024: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2024/06/12/ruby-3-3-3-released/

These release notes provide a comprehensive overview of the major changes, performance improvements, language changes, standard library updates, and more.

Additionally, the Ruby documentation website (ruby-doc.org) has a dedicated section for each Ruby version, where you can find detailed documentation for all the new features, methods, and changes introduced in that version.

By referring to the official Ruby website, release notes, and documentation, you can stay up-to-date with the latest Ruby versions and understand the changes and improvements made in each release. This will help you leverage the new features and enhancements in your Ruby projects.

Ruby 2 to Ruby 3: What's New?

Ruby 3 was released in December 2020, and it brought several improvements and new features compared to Ruby 2. Here are some of the key changes:

  • Performance Improvements: Ruby 3 is faster than Ruby 2, thanks to various optimizations and the new YJIT (Yet Another Just-In-Time Compiler) feature. This means your Ruby programs will run more quickly.
  • Concurrency and Parallelism: Ruby 3 introduces new features like Ractor (Ruby Actor model) and Fiber Scheduler, which make it easier to write concurrent and parallel programs. This can be handy for applications that need to handle multiple tasks simultaneously.
  • Pattern Matching: Ruby 3 introduces a new pattern matching syntax, which makes it easier to match and extract data from complex data structures.
  • Static Analysis: Ruby 3 includes a new static analysis feature called Ractor, which can help catch certain types of errors before you run your code.
  • Miscellaneous Improvements: Ruby 3 also includes improvements to the language's standard library, support for positional arguments in keyword arguments, and more.

Installing Multiple Ruby Versions

Sometimes, you might need to work on different projects that require different versions of Ruby.
Fortunately, there're some tools that makes it easy to install and switch between multiple Ruby versions on your computer:

Greetings! Thank you for reading an article titled Upgrade Your Development: New Features in Ruby and How to Manage Multiple Versions which has been authored by Le Huan Vu. In case you wish to gather more insights about the author, you may consider visiting .