Ruby in a Nutshell

The Future of Ruby

As Ruby is now used by so many programmers worldwide, I don’t see making any radical changes in the near future. But I’d like to keep Ruby competitive with other scripting languages.

I don’t have a concrete plan for future versions, even 2.0, but I do have plans to fix some of the remaining drawbacks in the Ruby implementation. For example, Ruby’s internals are too complex to maintain and can be slower than other languages. I’m going to reimplement the interpreter as a bytecode engine to simplify interpreter core and boost performance. Also, recently an intriguing but still vague possibility of a joint backend among Perl, Python, and Ruby has surfaced.

I’d also like to support M17N (Multilingualization) in Ruby. M17N offers the ability to handle various human languages along with the necessary encodings. We already implemented a prototype that can handle ASCII, UTF-8, and several Japanese encodings.

The future is unknown, and my imagination is limited. But you can certainly contribute to the evolution of Ruby via the process called RCR (or Ruby Change Requests) explained in the next section. We look forward to your contributions.