Changes in Ruby 1.8.5

• Non-blocking IO
• Process.getrlimit/setrlimit
• Changes in rdoc/ri
• RSS
• New style API for RSS generation ruby-talk:197284
• Misc
• What breaks (!!!)
• References

Non-blocking IO

Several methods backported from HEAD have been added:

• BasicSocket#recv_nonblock
• IO#read_nonblock
• IO#write_nonblock
• Socket#accept_nonblock
• Socket#connect_nonblock
• Socket#recvfrom_nonblock
• TCPServer#accept_nonblock
• UDPSocket#recvfrom_nonblock
• UNIXServer#accept_nonblock

(see ruby-core:7917, ruby-core:7925).

Process.getrlimit/setrlimit

See ruby-dev:28729.

Changes in rdoc/ri

• lots of documentation added
• RubyGems support: ri will search gem installation dirs for additional documentation
• new options to limit the search path

RSS

• added RSS::RootElementMixin#to_xml (ruby-talk:197284), which can be used to convert feeds to a different RSS version as follows:

   rss10 = RSS::Parser.parse(File.read("1.0.rdf"))
   File.open("2.0.rss", "w") {|f| f.print(rss10.to_xml("2.0"))}

• Support for taxonomies added to the RSS parser and generator.
• A number of convenience methods added
  • (fillme)

New style API for RSS generation ruby-talk:197284

The recommended style is now

xxx.new_yyy do |yyy|
  yyy.zzz = zzz
  ...
end

This corresponds to the following in pre-1.8.5:

    yyy = xxx.new_yyy
    yyy.zzz = zzz

Misc

• added Kernel#Pathname(path) (require 'pathname')
• added Kernel#pretty_inspect (require 'pp')
• changes in the GC subsystem that result in better performance in some cases
• added OptionParser#getopts
• the per-object overhead went down to 20 bytes on win32 (from 24) ruby-core:7474

What breaks (!!!)

• Binding.of_caller, and therefore breakpoint (including Rails')*1
• several problems in ri reported: the documentation for some methods seems to have disappeared, and several methods that should not be documented appear in the indices; see ruby-core:08709

References

• Ruby's ChangeLog
• Japanese changelog: http://www.ruby-lang.org/ja/man/?cmd=view;name=ruby+1.8.5+feature