Ruby 2.4.1 Released: What’s Changed

Ruby 2.4.1, a ‘teeny’ release, has been released. If you want the raw files, the official Ruby site has the goodies, or you can check out the Downloads section below.

I’m going to quickly run through what’s different compared to Ruby 2.4.0 and why you should consider upgrading (or not). I’ve tried to put things into a rough order of priority or personal interest.

Most of the changes are fixes for regressions, with the Onigmo regular expression engine update introducing the only new “feature” I could find.

Ch-ch-changes

• Onigmo, the regular expressions library and Oniguruma fork that powers Ruby’s regex support, has been updated to version 6.1.1. This introduces support for the absent operator which I’ve done a full write-up about.
• RubyGems has been upgraded to 2.6.10 from 2.6.8. No significant changes.
• Resolution of bug #13313: Segmentation fault when calling Thread.new with Symbol proc shorthand — p Thread.new(1, &:to_s).value caused Ruby to die on 2.4.0.
• Resolution of bug #13090: Cannot use return statement in lambdas using instance_eval — This meant instance_eval(&lambda { |_| return }) would raise a LocalJumpError exception on 2.4.0. Now resolved.
• Resolution of bug #12705: yielding args to a lambda uses block/proc rather than lambda/method semantics. (This strikes me as being related to #13090 above.)
• Resolution of bug #12884: Using a HashWithIndifferentAccess with a default value in a function with a keyword parameter converts it to a Hash. (The way Ruby’s keyword arguments feature works seems to have been interfering with non-Hash hashes used as default values on the first parameter of a method that also uses keyword arguments. Try saying that ten times in a row! This appears to have been a problem since Ruby 2.2.)
• Resolution of bug #8996: pthread_mutex_lock EINVAL
• Resolution of bug #9605: Chaining “each_with_index.detect &lambda” raises ArgumentError — the thread on the bug is worth reading for this unusual case.
• Resolution of bug #13074: When executing instance_exec with symbol.to_proc, it ignores first argument.
• Tempfile#size now returns 0 (rather than nil) when an empty file is written. More.
• Fixed that (?~\S+) in a regex might cause an infinite loop.
• 4r**40000000 (or essentially any rational raised to a high enough power) would cause a segfault. It now returns Infinity, as with integers. More.
• Resolution of bug #12613: iseq_set_sequence: adjust bug -1 < 0 (retry inside begin/rescue)
• Resolution of bug #12855: Inconsistent keys identity in compare_by_identity Hash when using literals
• Resolution of bug #13073: Hash Key => Proc parse failure
• Resolution of bug #13076: SEGV in io.c when reading closed stream in Thread
• Resolution of bug #13085: io.c io_fwrite creates garbage
• Resolution of bug #13096: error using undef_method + refinements
• Resolution of bug #13158: UNIXServer#closed? returns false after UNIXServer#close called
• Resolution of bug #13176: Segfault during exception raising because rb_thread_t.errinfo is set to IMEMO object
• Resolution of bug #13227: Crash when refine subclass method and call super
• Resolution of bug #13234: Infinite recursion (stack overflow) in parse_char_class()
• Resolution of bug #13242: SIGSEGV in rb_bigzero_p()
• Resolution of bug #13287: Stack consistency error (sp: 97, bp: 96)
• Resolution of bug #13325: Block is not passed to Symbol proc if using refinements. (There’s an example of this in the fix.)
• A fix for valid_encoding? when used with UTF32.
• #fdiv on large Integers has been made very slightly more precise. You could be working on orbital mechanics calculations for this to have an impact, however :-)
• Big improvements to the documentation for rss/atom.
• Lots of the typical documentation tweaks and fixes, including clarifying the documents for puts that its record separator is always a newline.

Downloads

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.4/ruby-2.4.1.tar.bz2
• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.4/ruby-2.4.1.tar.gz
• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.4/ruby-2.4.1.tar.xz
• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.4/ruby-2.4.1.zip

RVM is also already updated, so if you’re using that:

rvm get head
rvm install 2.4.1