From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2006-05-23T02:25:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

On Tue, 23 May 2006, Jamal Mazrui wrote:

> With respect, I do not agree with the argument that one should use an
> external language to get speed in Ruby.  I do not know C and have no
> desire to learn it. I program in Ruby partly to avoid the low level
> details that C programming demands.

i appreciate the sentiment.  however, saying you don't want to learn C, but
that you want fast code is a bit like saying you want to run a marathon but
only want to train 30 minutes three times per week - it just won't happen.

> For the most part my Ruby programs are fast enough, but there are noticeable
> slow points that cannot simply be solved by a better algorithm.

here's a challenge:  show us one and see what the list can do.  so far i've
never seen a case where posting to the list didn't yield huge performance
gains.  seriously, you'll be doing the community a favour by showing such a
concrete example - see what you can distill into a short example and post it.
we need hard examples to work with - otherwise we are all waisting our time
and energy.

> reading, it seems that Python is the main competitor to Ruby at this time.
> I prefer the syntax of Ruby, but the performance of Python is a significant
> point in its favor.  The more that Ruby can eliminate this gap, the better
> it will fare in competition, adoption, and third party support--in my
> opinion..

narray (numerical ruby lib) is faster than pythons.  gsl is the same.
image-magick is the same.  what specific speed difference are you referring
to?

not trying to be difficult - let's just work with something __real__.

kind regards.

-a
-- 
be kind whenever possible... it is always possible.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama