The Ruby MRI 1.9.3 RC1 has just been released and I wanted to try it out, the latest version of rvm only lists the 1.9.3 preview1 and 1.9.3-head which doesn’t appear to work correctly. Here’s how I managed to get 1.9.3 installed using rvm:

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 rvm install ruby-1.9.3-tv1_9_3_rc1 --with-libyaml-dir=$HOME/.rvm/usr
 rvm alias create 1.9.3-rc ruby-1.9.3-tv1_9_3_rc1

 rvm use 1.9.3-rc

Ruby 1.9.3 works quite well (all of my tests still seem to be green), although there are a few small issues at the moment. For example ruby-debug19 doesn’t currently install. Running a quick test shows that 1.9.3 does indeed seem to load up a rails environment much quicker, here is a comparison of running rspec and cucumber tests for a rails 3.1 project.

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 Using /Users/mario/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-tv1_9_3_rc1

 time rspec spec
 Finished in 22.81 seconds

 real  0m28.469s
 user  0m11.000s
 sys   0m0.895s

 time cucumber
 0m4.816s

 real  0m12.955s
 user  0m10.579s
 sys   0m0.701s

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 Using /Users/mario/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290

 time rspec spec
 Finished in 25.69 seconds

 real  0m43.826s
 user  0m18.193s
 sys   0m1.367s

 time cucumber
 0m6.007s

 real  0m24.559s
 user  0m19.324s
 sys   0m1.200s

As you can see the actual tests themselves ran faster but not by much, the total execution time went down a lot though as 1.9.3 has some new fixes to dramatically speed up the time it takes to require libraries.

Update

1.9.3rc1 is now available directly through RVM. Simply run:

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 rvm get head
 rvm reload
 rvm install 1.9.3