JRuby 0.9.8 is here

The JRuby team is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 0.9.8.

Download at: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/

This release has some great improvements:

• Ruby on Rails support. We have been working hard on getting Rails own unit tests running and over 98% of them now run successfully. We feel things are running well enough to invite Ruby users to kick the tires and help root out any final issues.
• Ruby classes can extend concrete/abstract Java classes and override methods
• New Java primitive array syntax
• Reimplementation of String, Numeric classes, and Array to be more correct and performant
• Significant bottlenecks have been identified. In some cases IO is 6.5x faster than previous releases. Java included classes are significantly faster than in the past.
• 220 Jira issues resolved since last release

Special thanks to Marcin Mielżyński for his tireless work in rewriting a number of core classes to be much for correct and quick. His attention to detail has rooted out many corner cases.

The amount of IRC conversations, mailing list threads, bug reports, patches, and blog entries in the community has been a great help and our community is really making a huge difference in how fast JRuby is improving. The amount of progress is really staggering!

If you have ever thought that JRuby wasn't mature enough, I would like to contradict that now. With this release we are better than ever.

More information can be found at http://www.jruby.org.