[zhisme]

Am I the only one who expected something bigger in a major release? With Ruby 3 we had the whole “3x3” story and significant performance improvements. This release feels more like a minor version, something closer to 3.5.

I don’t want to downplay the work done by the maintainers on the contrary, huge thanks to them. But I do feel the version number is a bit misleading.

That said, the work on the ZJIT[1] compiler is massive. It’s serious, professional engineering, and definitely deserves respect.

[1]: https://rubykaigi.org/2025/presentations/maximecb.html

[werdnapk]

I think the major version change is more of a celebratory thing with Ruby being 30 years as of 2025.

[Doctor_Fegg]

Ruby doesn’t follow semver.

[codesnik]

eh, it's just a little celebration. Let Matz have it.

[prh8]

One issue is gems which are locked `ruby < 4.0` which will now require updating, and releasing 4.0 instead of 3.5 was only done very recently.

For a more concrete example, the grpc gem locks Ruby versions (< 3.5), and they refuse to change it. So until they support the next Ruby version, we could test ruby-next by testing with a preview release. This worked for 3.4 and 3.5, but now doesn't work with 4.0 (bundler resolves 4.0-preview2 > 3.5, whereas we are able to do 3.5-preview1).

So unless I feel like doing a lot of grunt work (which I don't), I can't even test Ruby 4 in our app until they release a new version. And while I recognize this is an issue with the gem, it is a consequence of choosing to do 4.0.

[prh8]

For future readers, I mistakenly referenced the grpc gem; I was thinking of the gem `gruf` which is a grpc framework