From: Michael Neumann <mneumann@...>
Date: 2004-11-06T07:00:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby is a slow performer

On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 06:31:33AM +0900, David G. Andersen wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 06:23:41AM +0900, Christian Szegedy scribed:
> > gabriele renzi wrote:
> > 
> > >About the shootout. Most of the stuff is plan useless in ruby.
> > >You won't implemente heapsort in ruby, cause you have sort/sort_by.
> > >Nor you would use
> > >http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/lang/ruby/random.ruby.html
> > >because you have rand().
> > 
> > You are correct. I would say that the shootout is extremely
> > misleading, for example the Python people do dubious tricks
> > to make it look fast: for example the matrix multiplication is
> > implemented by calling the an extension method.
> 
> Why is that unrealistic?  You could do the same in Ruby by
> implementing the library 'Matrix' class in C.  We already have
> a library that handles the stuff;  it's just a matter of
> optimization (== time == extra code in C that's harder to
> maintain, unfortunately).  I actually played with this a bit.
> Right now, using the Ruby matrix class does two things to
> that test:
> 
>   a)  Reduces the lines of code by nearly half
>   b)  Increases the runtime by a factor of two.  (ouch)
> 
> If we had a superfast matrix class, it would give (a) along
> with decreasing the runtime by a factor of ten or so.  Sounds

We have a superfast matrix class: NArray (not in standard lib).
It claimed to be 3x faster than NumPy for some tests and a bit faster
than Octave for for matrix operations.

http://www.ir.isas.ac.jp/~masa/ruby/index-e.html

Regards,

  Michael