From: Jim Freeze <jim@...>
Date: 2005-06-10T23:59:44+09:00
Subject: Re: python/ruby benchmark.

* Phil Tomson <ptkwt@aracnet.com> [2005-06-10 13:55:28 +0900]:

> In article <20050610024316.GA21914@freeze.org>,
> Jim Freeze  <jim@freeze.org> wrote:
> >* gabriele renzi <surrender_it@remove-yahoo.it> [2005-06-10 09:35:28 +0900]:
> >
> >> I agree, It would be nice if ruby was faster. Luckily,
> >> people are working on this.
> >
> >Don't go away thinking that X is faster than Ruby. Do
> >your own tests. We tested Perl against Ruby in a real
> >world problem (netlist parsing) and Ruby was faster
> >than Perl by 30%. When we did a C implementation
> >(which could now be done automatically with optimize)
> >it was 100% faster (ie, took half the time.)
> 
> Are you saying that the Ruby netlist parser was 100% faster than the C 
> implementation or the other way around?

The C implementation was Ruby C (my bad). So, the Ruby C 
implementation ended up twice as fast as the Perl 
implementation. Bad comparison you say. Well, in this 
environment, we found over four netlist parsers written 
in Perl. These parsers were intermingled with the netlist 
munging code, so it was difficult to do abstraction and 
pull out the netlist parser in Perl and optimize it.

But you say, well all that could and should have been done in 
Perl. My response is, well, you had 10 years, what were you
waiting for?

The pragmatic nature of Ruby lent itself to writing better code,
more modular code, and thus the ability to optimize a particular
module muuuchh more than Perl. ;)

-- 
Jim Freeze
Theory and practice are the same, in theory. -- Ryan Davis