Anyone seen any tangible metrics or sites that talk about the percentages of Rails apps in production that are using Ruby 1.8 vs Ruby 1.9?
In other words, we're contemplating back support for 1.8 but want to know if it's really worth it.
Thanks!
Chad
We can't know how much site use Ruby 1.9. But the (railsplugins)[http://www.railsplugins.org/plugins?criteria[]=5] website try to say if plugin is or not compatible with Ruby 1.9
There a really less hosting service with Ruby 1.9 compatibility. Heroku try to be compatible in beta and EY try too. But it's not compatible :(
If you already have a 1.8 application that is running fine then there may be reasons to wait before switching (Plugin incompatibility mainly).
If the application is already written in 1.9 then don't bother. 1.9 is such a large improvement (particularly in regards to performance) over 1.8 that there's no sense in building a 1.8 application. Any webhosts that do not yet support 1.9 are definitely going to support it soon since I can't think of anyone building a new application in 1.8 but I can think of half a dozen people building new apps on 1.9.
There are enough differences between the two that maintaining compatibility for both would be a chore for large applications. In particular, you would need to run your unit and functional tests twice (once for each platform).