I’ve read that Ruby 1.9 is a lot faster than 1.8, however it seems like it hasn’t become the standard in the Rails community yet. What are the pros and cons of using Ruby 1.9 for new apps?
Edit to say: What I found confusing was that while its not officially recommended, it seems like 2.3 brought compatibility. Just wondering if people have any real world experience of attempting large sites in 1.9.
Also: Any large gotchas to be found in starting an app in 1.8 and upgrading to 1.9 at a later date..
The current release of Rails (2.3.2) should work just fine with Ruby 1.9, and Rails 3.0 should have no problem.
That being said, the adoption of Ruby 1.9 for use with Rails is more a social problem than a technical one right now. There’s a chicken-and-egg situation with many Ruby gems and Rails plugins not being compatible with Ruby 1.9, which causes developers to not use 1.9, which in turn causes fewer patches to be released, etc, etc, etc…
Gregory Brown (author of the fantastic Prawn Ruby gem) gave a great talk recently at GoRuCo called “Where is Ruby Really heading?” that addresses these issues.
In short, Ruby 1.9 is a substantial leap forward for the language and platform, and it’s essential that developers install it and being patching their libraries and dependencies in order to ensure more rapid adoption.
Whether it’s already feasible for your needs is likely dependent on your app’s dependencies and whether or not the time spent writing patches equates to the benefit of Ruby 1.9.