From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-05-23T04:01:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

I've always had a sense that some of what makes Ruby so beautiful is
_precisely_ what makes it slow. Some of this is a matter of
implementation (if anyone remembers the early implementations of ML,
you know what good tail-recursion can do for you. Plus Ruby seems to
get super-linearly worse as its working set grows), but some of it is
fundamental. Metaprogramming is very hard to do without depending on a
lot of string comparing at runtime. I've got a language design
background (I made a lot of money writing compilers for scripting
languages), and I've had to deal with this problem in other languages.
YARV looks like beautiful work, but I have a gut-feeling that it won't
solve the "speed" problem all by itself.

I won't wade into the whole "is Ruby fast enough" question because
defining "enough" really deserves its own thread. It's an important
question though, especially as regards Ruby in corporate IT.