Judging by the comments echoing throughout the blog-sphere, it seems like encodings (and a reluctance to move to Rails 3 because it is new) is the main thing preventing people from moving to Ruby 1.9. But I can't wait for folks to move over so we can finally put to rest all the complaints about ruby being so slow. http://www.rubychan.de/share/yarv_speedups.html (Link contains comparison of speed of ruby 1.8.6 to 1.9.2).