Ruby 2.6, the latest version of the venerable dynamic language, is now available as a production release.

Ruby 2.6 adds an initial implementation of a JIT (just-in-time compiler) to improve performance of program execution. Ruby’s JIT compiler writes C code to disk and produces a C compiler process to generate native code. The JIT compiler is supported when Ruby is built by the GCC compiler, Clang, or Microsoft Visual C++, which must be available at runtime.

Other new features in Ruby 2.6 include:

You can download Ruby 2.6 from the Ruby project website.

Arriving on Christmas Day 2017, Ruby 2.5.0 is the first stable release in the 2.5 series.

It boosts performance by 5 to 10 percent by removing trace instructions from bytecode that has been found to be overhead. A dynamic instrumentation technique is used instead. Also, block passing by a block parameter has been made three times faster than it was in Ruby 2.4, through use of the Lazy Proc allocation technique.

Other features that improve performance include:

Other improvements in Ruby 2.5 include:

Ruby 2.5 also features a bug fix in which the SecureRandom library, for generating random numbers, which now prefers OS-provided sources over OpenSSL. Also, standard libraries such as cmath, csv, date, dbm, and ipaddr have been promoted to gems.

You can download version 2.5 by opening this tar.gz file or this Zip file.

This story, "What’s new in Ruby 2.6" was originally published by InfoWorld.