We use ruby at Spiceworks and are internally switching to 1.9.1. We are doing it for performance as well as internationalisation. While the encoding was an issu

We use ruby at Spiceworks and are internally switching to 1.9.1. We are doing it for performance as well as internationalisation. While the encoding was an issue upfront (and we have guys converting our app from 1.8.6 as their primary focus), we do the edge-UTF8 approach, and we've updated a lot of the gems to 1.9 without waiting for others.