On December 25, the maintainers of Ruby released version 2.2.0 of the open source programming language. The biggest changes in the update related to garbage collection, including a new garbage collection algorithm and the introduction of garbage collection for symbols.
Other improvements in Ruby 2.2 include better memory management, support for Unicode 7.0 and the addition of several new methods, including Enumerable#slice_after, Enumerable#slice_when, Float#next_float, Float#prev_float, File.birthtime, File#birthtime and String#unicode_normalize. The latest version of the language also ended support for the mathn library and updated six other libraries (Psych 2.0.8, Rake 10.4.2, RDoc 4.2.0, RubyGems 2.4.5, test-unit 3.0.8 and minitest 5.4.3).
More information about the release is available on Ruby’s GitHub site.