We are happy to announce that we have just released the Bitnami Ruby Stack with Ruby 2.2.0 and Rails 4.2.0. It is completely self-contained and will not conflict with your current development environment. You can download it, give it a try and safely remove it when you are done.
If you are not familiar with the Bitnami Ruby Stack, it is a free package that simplifies the development and deployment of Ruby on Rails applications. This version includes ready-to-run versions of Apache 2.4.10, MySQL 5.5.40, PostgreSQL 9.3.5, Ruby 2.2.0 and Rails 4.2.0. It also includes RVM, NGINX, Passenger, Git, Redis, Node.js and all required dependencies.
Bitnami Ruby Stack can be deployed using all-in-one free native installers (for Linux and Mac OS X), virtual machines and the most popular public cloud providers: Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine.
The main changes in the new Ruby 2.2.0 are the following:
- Ruby’s Garbage Collector is now able to collect Symbol type objects. This reduces memory usage of Symbols
- Experimental support for using vfork(2) with system() and spawn() have also been added. This could potentially bring huge speed-up when a large process executes external commands many times
- Additional option for configure.in to use jemalloc. This feature is still experimental and currently deactivated by default
This version includes new features and improvements but it has a few compatibility issues as well. You can find a list of changes in the Ruby repository.