Version 1.1 is the latest release of Rubinius, a Ruby implementation based around a C++ and LLVM virtual machine but with the bytecode compiler and majority of the core written in Ruby itself. It's often called a "Ruby in Ruby." We celebrated and explained the background to Rubinius' 1.0 release 4 months ago.

The Rubinius 1.1 release brings the typical benefits to the table — performance improvements, bug fixes, improved memory usage, and increased stability (notably with Rails 3) — and brings together 546 commits from 16 developers led by Evan Phoenix. More technically, additions include block inlining within the JIT system, a new GIL algorithm, a "report" system for VM crashes, and better checks for detecting bad extensions.

The Rubinius team have promised some blog posts over the next few weeks going into the new features, so if you want to keep up, follow their Twitter account @rubinius. Dirkjan Bussink also have a Rubinius talk lined up for October's Ruby and Rails conference in Amsterdam (tickets now on sale).

Installing Rubinius 1.1

You can download a tarball archive or binary installer (OS X only) from the rubini.us Web site, but it's also possible to use RVM to manage the installation. If you're using RVM, try this:

rvm update --head
rvm reload
rvm install ruby-1.8.7-p249  # only if you don't already have it installed.. the Rubinius build process uses it
rvm install rbx-1.1.0