From: cremes.devlist@...
Date: 2006-05-23T02:52:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance


On May 22, 2006, at 11:59 AM, pat eyler wrote:

> On 5/22/06, cremes.devlist@mac.com <cremes.devlist@mac.com> wrote:
>> What I found most striking about both interviews was their mention of
>> YARV and Ruby's poor computational performance. Zed said, and I  
>> quote:
>>
>> > I'll be honest right away though and say that Ruby is slow. The
>> > Ruby community has been ignoring the huge "performance" elephant
>> > standing in the room and they need to start talking about it so it
>> > goes away. Elephants hate being talked about. There are a few
>> > efforts to make Ruby faster, but I see a lot less action than is
>> > needed to solve the problem. One solution in the works is a real
>> > virtual machine called Rite (or YARV depending on who you talk to)
>> > which is showing some real promise and seems to be speed
>> > competitive with the fastest Java implementations.
>
> I think you're quoting selectively here.  There are some counter  
> points in
> both interviews.

Of course I engaged in selective quoting. That's 90% of the fun! :-)

>> So what is being done to get YARV the attention it deserves? Why
>> aren't we talking about it all the time? What can I personally do to
>> help? Are there valid excuses for not focusing on improving Ruby's
>> poor computational performance?
>
> Are you on the Ruby Core mailing list?  Are you posting bugs and
> feature requests to the trackers?  Have you downloaded and built
> YARV so that you can test it on your system?  All of these are ways
> you can get involved and help out.

I am on ruby-core but mostly just so I can bask in the glow of the  
smart people on that list. Plus, I *have* submitted at least one bug  
report to that least (only to have it turn out to be clumsy handling  
if IPv4 and IPv6 on OSX).

I have not yet downloaded and built YARV, but I will in the very near  
future. I am not a great programmer, but as a result I do find neat  
little test cases that can try the patience of even the most liberal  
parser & compiler!

cr