Ruby 2.6 Released With Experimental JIT Compiler - Can Yield ~1.7x Performance Boost

The folks behind the Ruby programming language have rolled out their version 2.6.0 release for Christmas. Most notable about Ruby 2.6 is that it brings an experimental JIT compiler.

Ruby 2.6 has an initial just-in-time compiler for improving the performance of Ruby programs. Ruby's JIT generates C code on disk and spawns a common C compiler for generating the native code. The common C compiler can be the likes of GCC, Clang, or Visual C++. Ruby 2.6 benchmarks have found this JIT technique to be about 1.7x faster for CPU intensive workloads.

Ruby 2.6 also has some language changes like adding support for endless ranges, allowing constants to start with non-ASCII capital letters, and more. Outside of the JIT compiler space there are also various other compiler improvements.

More details on Ruby 2.6 via Ruby-Lang.org.