If you're playing with IRB often like me, you should try awesome_print and interactive_editor. The first one gives you pp on steroids - a beautiful coloured printing in IRB.The second one gives you the power to invoke your favourite editor (vim, emacs, TextMate), write code and when you exit, your code is evaluated and ready to be used in IRB.
After releasing version 1.0 of Rubinius and JRuby hitting 1.5, I decided to test these great VMs against ruby 1.8.7 and the latest 1.9.2 to see how they perform. This benchmark uses Antonio Cangiano's ruby-benchmark-suite. I've posted part of the results as image, you can find all results as pdf.
Tested versions of ruby, using RVM are:
My software:
My hardware:
My comment: I don't understand how VM works and how they are implemented, but looking at the results I can say that Rubinius and future 1.9.2 show real progress and great perspective.
As a disclaimer I will quote Antonio Cangiano :
"Synthetic benchmarks cannot predict how fast your programs will be with one implementation or another. They provide an (entertaining) educated guess, but you shouldn’t draw overly definitive conclusions from them. Furthermore, the Ruby Benchmark Suite has many tests that don’t provide much insight when it comes to comparing implementations. They are there for legacy reasons and will probably be removed in the future. For the time being, take them with a grain of salt."
If your're looking for a framework for managing zsh configuration, oh-my-zsh is your thing. It supports auto update, auto completion, git integration, very cool themes and more. You can install it with cloning the repo or via simple command:
wget http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh -O - | sh
This is how it looks while playing with git:
