From: Adrian Howard <adrianh@...>
Date: 2005-08-13T00:38:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Performance

On 12 Aug 2005, at 15:27, Bradley Kite wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm a relatively new Ruby programmer, I am curious as to what Ruby is
> trying to achieve that other scripting languages do not already  
> offer (Apart
> from the syntactic differences of yet another scripting language,  
> that is).
> The reason I ask is that it must offer something that is worth a  
> lot considering
> it runs twice as slowly as Perl (see below).

Well, non-idiomatic integer arithmatic might run twice as slowly :-)

Who cares? I certainly don't since the vast majority of my cycles are  
not spent in tight loops doing integer arithmetic. If it was I  
wouldn't be using Perl or Ruby (I'd probably be using Lisp :-)

The only performance figures that are important are whether tasks are  
fast enough in a particular context. Otherwise we'd all be writing  
assembler.

My pitch for Ruby to a Perl programmer would be:

-    Perl 6 now! Many  useful things that Perl 5 lacks and that Perl  
6 will give you like a decent built in OO system, classes as proper  
objects, coroutines, simple block passing, etc. Ruby does now.

-    Ruby has a simple threading system that actually works

-    Ruby has the same TIMTOWTDI attitude as Perl so you'll feel at  
home, but has some better ways of doing some things that can make  
your code considerably less ugly.

-    A more concise clearer syntax for many operations, which means  
you type less and your code is easier to maintain.

Cheers,

Adrian