Ruby Tuesday

(blogarhythm ~ Ruby - Kaiser Chiefs)
@a_matsuda convinced us to dive into Ruby 2.0 at RedDotRubyConf, so I guess this must be the perfect day of the week for it!

Ruby 2.0.0 is currently at p195, and we heard at the conference how stable and compatible it is.

One change we learned that may catch us if we do much multilingual work that's not already unicode is the change that Ruby now assumes UTF-8 encoding for source files. So the special "encoding: utf-8" marker becomes redundant, but if we don't include it the behaviour in 2.0.0 can differ from earlier versions:

$ cat encoding_binary.rb 
s = "\xE3\x81\x82"
p str: s, size: s.size
$ ruby -v encoding_binary.rb 
ruby 2.0.0p195 (2013-05-14 revision 40734) [x86_64-darwin11.4.2]
{:str=>"あ", :size=>1}
$ ruby -v encoding_binary.rb 
ruby 1.9.3p429 (2013-05-15 revision 40747) [x86_64-darwin11.4.2]
{:str=>"\xE3\x81\x82", :size=>3}

Quickstart on MacOSX with RVM

I use rvm to help manage various Ruby installs on my Mac, and trying out new releases is exactly the time you want it's assistance to prevent screwing up your machine. There were only two main things I needed to take care of to get Ruby 2 installed and running smoothly:

1. Update rvm so it knows about the latest Ruby releases
2. Update my OpenSSL installation (it seems 1.0.1e is required although I haven't found that specifically documented anywhere)

Here's a rundown of the procedure I used in case it helps (note, I am running MacOSX 10.7.5 with Xcode 4.6.2). First I updated rvm and attempted to install 2.0.0:

$ rvm get stable
# => updated ok
$ rvm install ruby-2.0.0
Searching for binary rubies, this might take some time.
No binary rubies available for: osx/10.7/x86_64/ruby-2.0.0-p195.
Continuing with compilation. Please read 'rvm mount' to get more information on binary rubies.
Installing requirements for osx, might require sudo password.
-bash: /usr/local/Cellar/openssl/1.0.1e/bin/openssl: No such file or directory
Updating certificates in ''.
mkdir: : No such file or directory
Password:
mkdir: : No such file or directory
Can not create directory '' for certificates.

Not good!!! What's all that about? Turns out to be just a very clumsy way of telling me I don't have OpenSSL 1.0.1e installed.

I already have OpenSSL 1.0.1c installed using brew (so it doesn't mess with the MacOSX system-installed OpenSSL), so updating is simply:

$ brew upgrade openssl
==> Summary
 /usr/local/Cellar/openssl/1.0.1e: 429 files, 15M, built in 5.0 minutes

So then I can try the Ruby 2 install again, starting with the "rvm requirements" command to first make sure all pre-requisites are installed:

$ rvm requirements
Installing requirements for osx, might require sudo password.
[...]
Tapped 41 formula
Installing required packages: apple-gcc42.................
Updating certificates in '/usr/local/etc/openssl/cert.pem'.
$ rvm install ruby-2.0.0
Searching for binary rubies, this might take some time.
No binary rubies available for: osx/10.7/x86_64/ruby-2.0.0-p195.
Continuing with compilation. Please read 'rvm mount' to get more information on binary rubies.
Installing requirements for osx, might require sudo password.
Certificates in '/usr/local/etc/openssl/cert.pem' already are up to date.
Installing Ruby from source to: /Users/paulgallagher/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p195, this may take a while depending on your cpu(s)
[...]
$ 

OK, this time it installed cleanly as I can quickly verify:

$ rvm use ruby-2.0.0
$ ruby -v
ruby 2.0.0p195 (2013-05-14 revision 40734) [x86_64-darwin11.4.2]
$ irb -r openssl
2.0.0p195 :001 > OpenSSL::VERSION
 => "1.1.0"
2.0.0p195 :002 > OpenSSL::OPENSSL_VERSION
 => "OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013"