A post on ruby-core reports on the plans for Ruby 1.9.2, from a meeting of some of the Japanese Ruby team.
The final 1.9.2 release is planned for the end of 2009 (25th December), the first preview will be out by July 17th, in time for the japanese Ruby conference Ruby Kaigi 2009.
Next to changes in the standard library, 1.9.2 might contain changes and improvements to the VM:
* improvement of YARV opcode set.[..]
* debugger support[..]
* profiler support[..]
* dtrace support on FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and OSX.[..]
Adding support for debugging/profiling instructions might enable fast debugging (see an overview of the state of Ruby debuggers). The 1.9.2 codebase also contains new optimizations (discussed by Koichi Sasada at RubyConf'08), which might be turned on by default in the final release.
Another potential change:
I hope to include the following features into the 1.9.2. But they might take too many time for deciding their specs and implementing them.
* SQLite as a standard library [ruby-dev:38463]
With Ruby 1.9.2 on the horizon - are you planning to switch to Ruby 1.9.x?