When Heroku launched in 2007 there was only a single Ruby version that could be used on the platform. In 2012 Heroku began to support multiple Ruby versions. Since then, we've had a holiday tradition of releasing the new versions of Ruby on the same day they come out, which always happens on Christmas day (December 25th).
If you're new to the community, you might be curious about where releasing a new minor version on Christmas comes from. To help answer that question, we interviewed Matz's, who works as the Chief Ruby Architect at Heroku in 2015. In his own words:
Ruby was originally my pet project, my side project. So releases usually happened during my holiday time. Now, it’s a tradition. It’s ruby-core’s gift to the Ruby community.
This year, it's my second opportunity to curl up with a cup of cocoa and help spread Ruby cheer to Heroku customers. As of publishing this article, you can now Ruby 2.7.0 is generally available on the platform. To use it put this in your Gemfile:
ruby '2.7.0'
Commit to git, push your code, and enjoy a happy holiday season from all of us at Heroku.
What's new in 2.7.0?
You can hear directly for yourself from Matz in his 2019 RubyConf keynote:
There's a ton of new features, and other sites have done a great job summarizing:
- RubyLang's 2.7.0 release announcement
- Saeloun's What's new in Ruby 2.7
- Prathamesh's What's new in Ruby 2.7
- Ruby Guide's What's new in Ruby 2.7
The largest new feature looks to be pattern matching:
And the biggest change to existing projects is likely to be that some use of keyword arguments has been deprecated in anticipation of the coming Ruby 3.0 release: