For almost 6 months now, rv has been installing Ruby versions in under a second, thanks to our precompiled Rubies. Today, we’re releasing rv 0.5, which brings that same focus on speed to installing Ruby on Windows, running scripts with rv run, and running and installing all sorts of gems and binaries via rvx and the rv tool commands.

As part of our quest to build a fast Ruby project tool, we’ve been hard at work on the next step of project management: installing gems. As we’ve learned over the last 15 years of working on Bundler and RubyGems, package managers are really complicated! It’s too much to try to copy all of rbenv, and ruby-build, and RubyGems, and Bundler, all at the same time.

While working on rv, there’s a specific question that has come up over and over again, in many different forms. In the simplest possible form, it boils down to:

We’re excited to announce rv version 0.3.0 has been released.

Highlights include support for Ruby versions 3.2.x, 3.5.0-preview1, and 4.0.0-preview2, as well as automatic Ruby installation during the rv ruby run command. We also added support for .tool-versions files, which are also used by the asdf and mise tools.