Ruby 3.3.0-rc1 Released (2024)

Posted by naruse on 11 Dec 2023

We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.3.0-rc1. Ruby 3.3 adds a new parser named Prism, uses Lrama as a parser generator, adds a new pure-Ruby JIT compiler named RJIT, and many performance improvements especially YJIT.

After the release of RC1, we will avoid introducing ABI incompatibilities wherever possible. If we need to do, we’ll announce it in the release note.

Prism

Introduced the Prism parser as a default gem
- Prism is a portable, error tolerant, and maintainable recursive descent parser for the Ruby language
Prism is production ready and actively maintained, you can use it in place of Ripper
- There is extensive documentation on how to use Prism
- Prism is both a C library that will be used internally by CRuby and a Ruby gem that can be used by any tooling which needs to parse Ruby code
- Notable methods in the Prism API are:
  - Prism.parse(source) which returns the AST as part of a ParseResult
  - Prism.dump(source) which returns the serialized AST as a String
  - Prism.parse_comments(source) which returns the comments
You can make pull requests or issues directly on the Prism repository if you are interested in contributing

Use Lrama instead of Bison

Replace Bison with Lrama LALR parser generator Feature #19637
- If you have interest, please see The future vision of Ruby Parser
- Lrama internal parser is replaced with LR parser generated by Racc for maintainability
- Parameterizing Rules (?, *, +) are supported, it will be used in Ruby parse.y

RJIT

Introduced a pure-Ruby JIT compiler RJIT and replaced MJIT.
- RJIT supports only x86-64 architecture on Unix platforms.
- Unlike MJIT, it doesn’t require a C compiler at runtime.
RJIT exists only for experimental purposes.
- You should keep using YJIT in production.
If you are interested in developing JIT for Ruby, please check out k0kubun’s presentation on Day 3 of RubyKaigi.

YJIT

Major performance improvements over 3.2
- Support for splat and rest arguments has been improved.
- Registers are allocated for stack operations of the virtual machine.
- More calls with optional arguments are compiled.
- Exception handlers are also compiled.
- Instance variables no longer exit to the interpreterwith megamorphic object shapes.
- Unsupported call types no longer exit to the interpreter.
- Integer#!=, String#!=, Kernel#block_given?, Kernel#is_a?,Kernel#instance_of?, Module#=== are specially optimized.
- Now more than 3x faster than the interpreter on optcarrot!
Significantly improved memory usage over 3.2
- Metadata for compiled code uses a lot less memory.
- Generate more compact code on ARM64
Compilation speed is now slightly faster than 3.2.
Add RubyVM::YJIT.enable that can enable YJIT at run-time
- You can start YJIT without modifying command-line arguments or environment variables.
- This can also be used to enable YJIT only once your application isdone booting. --yjit-disable can be used if you want to use otherYJIT options while disabling YJIT at boot.
Code GC is now disabled by default, and --yjit-exec-mem-size is treatedas a hard limit where compilation of new code stops.
- Better copy-on-write behavior on servers using unicorn and forking
- No sudden drops in performance due to code GC.
- You can still enable code GC if desired with --yjit-code-gc
ratio_in_yjit stat produced by --yjit-stats is now available in release builds,a special stats or dev build is no longer required to access most stats.
Exit tracing option now supports sampling
- --trace-exits-sample-rate=N
--yjit-perf is added to facilitate profiling with Linux perf.
More thorough testing and multiple bug fixes

M:N thread scheduler

M:N thread scheduler was introduced. [Feature #19842]
- M Ruby threads are managed by N native threads (OS threads) so the thread creation and management cost are reduced.
- It can break C-extension compatibility so that M:N thread scheduler is disabled on the main Ractor by default.
  - RUBY_MN_THREADS=1 environment variable enables M:N threads on the main Ractor.
  - M:N threads are enabled on non-main Ractors.
- RUBY_MAX_CPU=n environment variable sets maximum number of N (maximum number of native threads). The default value is 8.
  - Since only one Ruby thread per Ractor can run at the same time, the number of native threads will be used, which is the smaller of the number specified in RUBY_MAX_CPU and the number of running Ractors. So that single Ractor applications (most of applications) will use 1 native thread.
  - To support blocking operations, more than N native threads can be used.

Other Notable New Features

Language

Performance improvements

defined?(@ivar) is optimized with Object Shapes.
Name resolution such as Socket.getaddrinfo can now be interrupted (in environments where pthreads are available). Feature #19965
- For this purpose, a pthread is now created whenever calling getaddrinfo or getnameinfo. This incurs some overhead in name resolution (about 2.5x in our experiments). We do not expect the name resolution overhead to be a problem for most applications, but if you observe such, or if you see unexpected affects that you believe are due to this change, please report them.
Several performance improvements to the Garbage Collector
- Young objects referenced by old objects are no longer immediately promoted to the old generation. This significantly reduces the frequency of major GC collections. [Feature #19678]
- A new REMEMBERED_WB_UNPROTECTED_OBJECTS_LIMIT_RATIO tuning variable was introduced to control the number of unprotected objects cause a major GC collection to trigger. The default is set to 0.01 (1%). This significantly reduces the frequency of major GC collection. [Feature #19571]
- Write Barriers were implemented for many core types that were missing them, notably Time, Enumerator, MatchData, Method, File::Stat, BigDecimal and several others. This significantly reduces minor GC collection time and major GC collection frequency.
- Most core classes are now using Variable Width Allocation, notably Hash, Time, Thread::Backtrace, Thread::Backtrace::Location, File::Stat, Method. This makes these classes faster to allocate and free, use less memory and reduce heap fragmentation.
- Support for weak references has been added to the garbage collector. [Feature #19783]

Other notable changes since 3.2

IRB

IRB has received several enhancements, including but not limited to:

Advanced irb:rdbg integration that provides an equivalent debugging experience to pry-byebug (doc).
Pager support for ls, show_source and show_cmds commands.
More accurate and helpful information provided by the ls and show_source commands.
Experimental autocompletion using type analysis (doc).
It is now possible to change the font color and font style in the completion dialog by a newly introduced class Reline::Face (doc)

In addition, IRB has also undergone extensive refactoring and received dozens of bug fixes to facilitate easier future enhancements.

Compatibility issues

Note: Excluding feature bug fixes.

it calls without arguments in a block with no ordinary parameters aredeprecated. it will be a reference to the first block parameter in Ruby 3.4.Feature #18980

Removed constants

The following deprecated constants are removed.

Removed methods

The following deprecated methods are removed.

Removed environment variables

The following deprecated environment variables are removed.

Environment variable RUBY_GC_HEAP_INIT_SLOTS has been deprecated and is a no-op. Please use environment variables RUBY_GC_HEAP_{0,1,2,3,4}_INIT_SLOTS instead. Feature #19785

Stdlib compatibility issues

`ext/readline` is retired

We have reline that is pure Ruby implementation compatible with ext/readline API. We rely on reline in the future. If you need to use ext/readline, you can install ext/readline via rubygems.org with gem install readline-ext.
We no longer need to install libraries like libreadline or libedit.

C API updates

Updated C APIs

The following APIs are updated.

Removed C APIs

The following deprecated APIs are removed.

Standard library updates

RubyGems and Bundler warn if users require gem that is scheduled to become the bundled gems in the future version of Ruby.

Targeted libraries are:

abbrev
base64
bigdecimal
csv
drb
getoptlong
mutex_m
nkf
observer
racc
resolv-replace
rinda
syslog

The following default gem is added.

Download

https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.3/ruby-3.3.0-rc1.tar.gz

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https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.3/ruby-3.3.0-rc1.tar.xz

SIZE: 16163884SHA1: 26503f9bdc7d0a05aaa9836f54d3aa9e74a9ead9SHA256: 051815637f1fa75a1edf2c54b66d5d5b69563daad777da8dc39543b7754b5290SHA512: 82f4acfaad1dc47db27ee3eb952481a95b3474a98059e9e9f5ceb035b690d1faabe99f2ec52371c4089ed1615eb10c395f029088418fec4d26399b65b4f259b9

https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.3/ruby-3.3.0-rc1.zip

SIZE: 26735443SHA1: 35583453a7734216b08829ef0ec9ea1bc0d4ae7fSHA256: 56dd82e1dd714f2889ca975ae7befbe005675de08839c2cc4a484de2ae65201cSHA512: 7fbe414c230aedc9f364512bcbc213038f8f6e4268929a559d2527e2f3e32a140b394e37098ab7e59161236eca8b89cc9e52d73a3be8d7bd44faa91681483f5d

What is Ruby

Ruby was first developed by Matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto) in 1993,and is now developed as Open Source. It runs on multiple platformsand is used all over the world especially for web development.