Ruby 1.8 was initially released in August 2003, was stable for a long time, and was retired June 2013.[23] Although deprecated, there is still code based on it. Ruby 1.8 is only partially compatible with Ruby 1.9.
Ruby 1.8 has been the subject of several industry standards. The language specifications for Ruby were developed by the Open Standards Promotion Center of the Information-Technology Promotion Agency (a Japanese government agency) for submission to the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) and then to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It was accepted as a Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS X 3017) in 2011[24] and an international standard (ISO/IEC 30170) in 2012.[25]