From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2005-01-24T08:05:43+09:00
Subject: Re: looking at ruby...

Hello Paris,

>> Writing C extensions in Ruby is hardly more difficult than writing plain Ruby
>> code, and with a tool like RubyInline, it only gets easier.  Beacuse of this,
>> many people find no problem using Ruby despite it being slower than other
>> languages.

PS> So you're saying the common truth is that Ruby is fast enough, but only if you
PS> don't use Ruby but instead C?

PS> I think it discourages the community from focusing on things like bytecode,
PS> which could solve the problem. Because you're speaking as if using C *is* using
PS> Ruby. When instead it's a different language that can be used to work around
PS> the slowness.

There are some things that can never be done with anything else then a
static typed language. Computational algorithms like matrix
operations, parsing, decoding or compression will always be around 100-200
times slower. No bytecode will help you here. Even FORTH which is far better
then bytecode (direct threaded interpreter, together with a build in
stack that eliminates the function call overhead) is not very good in
doing these things.

Unfortunately many people still don't understand that many projects
should be written in multiple languages.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's