As far as I know: these REE releases/patches are for 1.8.7, a release of Ruby that isn't quite being actively developed, only maintained. Stuff similar to this is being folded into the official Ruby interpreter, which is now at 1.9.1 (1.9.2 soon!).

The uptake of Ruby 1.9.1 has been slow, and people are staying on 1.8.7 for compatibility reasons. Thus, these patches are trying to bring better memory performance to the old but widely used 1.8.7.

Swap 1.8.6 for 1.8.7 and you'd be more correct.

Can someone explain why this was downvoted? People are staying ion 1.8.6, not 1.8.7 (though some are moving there).

1.8.7 is being developed; 1.8.6 is in maintenance mode by way of EngineYard.

http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/

    * Ruby 1.9 - Edge version of Ruby
          o Ruby 1.9.1 - The latest stable release of Ruby 1.9 series.
    * Ruby 1.8 - Stable development version of Ruby
          o Ruby 1.8.6 - An ancient stable release of Ruby that Rails users love
          o Ruby 1.8.7 - A stable release of Ruby for bridging a gap between the 1.8 and 1.9.
    * Ruby - Version-independent topics

It probably will eventually... there are some cultural and linguistic aspects that are slowing down the process. Ruby is also not officially on a distributed SCM yet...

Good question. I'd like to know too.

This may sound silly, but I think it's the language barrier.

Also, Matz has been very loyal to the core group of Ruby maintainers even after Ruby has gone beyond fad status. Matz has been reluctant to put Ruby on a distributed SCM as well.

I expect all of these issues to be resolved within the next few years...

I think you're right about the language barrier.

Also, I don't really care if these community enhancements make it to the "proper" Ruby or not. The main thing is that it is available to the community, whether christened as the "Matz" Ruby or not.

true, but it's just a pain to use someone's nonstandard fork of ruby... there are a lot of awesome ones on github already, though, and I recently noticed that the latest version of ruby enterprise edition has rolled in a few of the better known ones.