As with past few releases, the last major release of the Ruby programming language before 3.0 was released around Christmas. Ruby 2.7.0 comes with new features and performance improvements “larger in scale than previous releases”, as the team behind Ruby puts it.

Among the newly introduced changes are pattern matching, REPL improvement, compaction GC and the separation of positional and keyword arguments. One of the most highlighted additions is Pattern matching, a widely used feature in functional programming languages. Introduced as an experimental feature, it can traverse a given object and assign its value if it matches a pattern.

As part of performance improvements, Ruby 2.7.0 sees JIT -ed code now being recompiled to less-optimized code. Moreover, Fiber’s cache strategy is changed and fiber creation is speeded up

Standard libraries are updated in the latest release. Further, IRB, Ruby’s default console, received the hugest update in years. Now it supports multiline editing, syntax highlighting of input and (some of) output, auto-indentation and other modern console behavior.

For complete list of changes, click here.