Ruby Programming Language: Improves Garbage Collection and Pattern Matching

ruby programming language

Ruby Programming Language was developed by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto of Japan in the mid-1990s for an interpreted, high-level, and general-purpose usage.

It was designed to support programmer productivity with the idea of making programming fun for programmers. 

In addition, it was emphasized on the understanding of the software by the humans first and then the computers. 

Overview on Ruby

While gaining huge popularity, the introduction of a framework known as Ruby on Rails, helped to increase its use in web programming. 

Ruby is an entirely object-oriented language. According to Ruby, everything is an object. This helps with the use of method chaining, where a number of codes can be confined into one. 

For example- if like to use three diverse methods on a string, one of the processes will be to write numerous lines of codes, like

x = “Computer”.reverse

y = x.upcase

z = y.downcase

Or, instead of this lengthy process, you can chain the methods in a single string, likez = “Computer”.reverse.upcase.downcase

Ruby is known to a very flexible language. It allows programmers to make changes and improvements in different parts of the language if they wish to. 

Another version of ruby is recently announced to release in December. However, its preview version is released to gather feedback from the users. Let’s take a thorough look into Ruby 2.7.

Ruby 2.7

The Ruby Programming Language has got the latest upgraded version; Ruby 2.7. However, as mentioned earlier, It is still in the preview stage. The latest version brings improvements in Pattern matching, garbage collection, and REPL (read-eval-print-loop).

Ruby 2.7 is scheduled to be released on December 2019. One of the new features in the new version is the compaction of garbage collection. This feature will help to defragment a fragmented memory space. 

The GC.compact method helps to compress the materials in a heap so that less space is used. Developers of Ruby said that multithreaded Ruby programs can slow it down by memory fragmentation. 

Apart from compaction garbage collection, Ruby 2.7 has many new improvements like:

  1. A new pattern matching ability has been added to it. This scans a given object and takes the decision if it matches any pattern. It is primarily used in a functional programming language. 
  2. Multi-line editing is another new feature of it. Ruby Supports irb, the interactive Ruby Shell. The documentation system of Ruby, rdoc, is also included in the latest version. By using irb, the developers can now have the reference displayed on the screen. This is useful while sharing it with a class, module or method. 
  3. Just-in-time (JIT) was first seen in Ruby 2.6. Though it is still in the experimental phase, it can recompile the JIT-ed code to a less optimized code if any optimization is turned invalid. Method inlining is used for a method when it is deemed pure.  
  4. The occurrence of each element is tallied by Enumerable#tally.
  5. An operator for method references, .:, is also admitted in the new version of Ruby as an experimental basis.
  6. One other experimental feature of Ruby 2.7 is the numbered parameter which is set as the default block parameter. 

Summing Up

Ruby is a very useful and easy language. It is best for you if you are developing a Website and Web Application. Including that, It is also very comfortable for use when compared to other languages out there. Thus, Ruby is a highly recommended language by us for use. Please let us know your experience in the comment section.

Next Post

In Details: Know the Use of Dapper ORM in C#

Sat Aug 31 , 2019
ORM or Object-relational mapping is just a simple mechanism where it becomes possible to address, access and manipulate objects without having to consider how those objects are relating to their respective data sources. It is a stratagem where a metadata explainer is put to function to join object code to […]

You May Like