Highlights:

* Focus on YARV (Yet Another Ruby VM)

* Improved character encoding support

* Adding parameter distinguishers a la Objective-C/SmallTalk.

    e.g. def step(by: step, to: limit) vs def step(step, limit)

* Adding scope encapsulation to monkey patching to avoid conflicting changes throughout projects

* Adding conflict resolution to Mix-ins by allowing method renaming for conflicting methods

* Add method combinations similar to what exists in Common Lisp

* New implementation of Ruby interpreter for embedded systems (RITE)

   Hoping to dethrone LUA for game programming 
   
   Want to enter appliances and distributed computing

> Adding parameter distinguishers a la Objective-C/SmallTalk.

Smalltalk or Python? Would `step(by:to:)` and `step(to:by:)` call the same method or different methods?

Yes, but this talk was uploaded to youtube 8 months ago.

Matz starts talking about 2.0 at about 14m30

RITE is exactly what I want to need.

The problem is that distributed systems (like message queues or notification services) are required to be fast/scalable but very hard to program/debug/test. One solution is embedding plugin mechanism in a carefully programmed framework. There are examples such as Tokyo Tyrant's Lua plugin or Apache Solr's plugin mechanism. But rather than Lua or Java, I want to use Ruby because it's syntax and semantics are very suitable to write plugins.

RITE will make it possible. Ruby may be new standard of embedded languages.

Section of Matz's RubyConf X presentation that covers RITE:

http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/rubyconf-2010-keynot...

No idea if this is kept up to date but http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-19/versions/5

The keyword arguments look a lot like the ones used in MacRuby.

Very interesting. I'll be curious to see how Ruby comes to be used in the near future and how it develops as a language.