From: James Britt <james_b@...>
Date: 2006-05-23T01:50:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

Kirk Haines wrote:

> 
> 
> The thing that always stands out to me in these performance discussions is 
> that people argue that Ruby needs a performance improvement, but there are 
> rarely any specifics attached to that analysis.

Very good point.

> ...
> 
> Ruby can be a bottleneck, but for the vast majority of Ruby users and the vast 
> majority of tasks people use if for, it is not the bottleneck.
> 
> It is not an elephant in the living room that everyone is ignoring if the 
> performance simply isn't a limiting factor.  It's an elephant out in the 
> paddock, where it belongs in those cases.  And those cases are the majority 
> of cases.

Or it's the hamster in the living room.  People don't comment on it 
because, for the most part, they don't see it.

Those people having speed issues: Is it not a reasonable option to 
replace the bottleneck Ruby code with custom compiled C libraries?

I tend to offer that as the general speed solution, but don't have all 
that much experience with it.  I've written Ruby modules in C as an 
educational exercise, and found it to be as easy as people say it is, 
but I've not had to do it in Real Life.


I'm curious if this is as good an option as I've been inclined to believe.

-- 
James Britt

"You harmonize; then you customize."
  - Wilson Pickett