From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2006-05-23T14:07:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

Peter Hickman wrote:
> One question I have to ask is "Wouldn't it make more sense to piggy back 
> on parrot (the Perl v6) engine?" and get all the benefit of the 
> performance improvements that parrot will pick up and the fact that 
> there are many, many very clever people working on parrot whose work we 
> could make use of.
> 
> Is there a reason why we are reinventing the wheel?
> 

There is indeed a project to piggyback on Parrot (called Cardinal),
probably a little less mature than Parrot itself, which is saying
something.

The wheel is being reinvented because, while Ruby can be written
for Parrot, Parrot isn't written (entirely) for Ruby.

We want a nice, clean impedance match between the language and
the bytecode compiler. Also complete control over its specification
is handy.

Finally, I wouldn't be surprised if YARV ends up outracing Parrot
(both in maturity and in running speed). But we'll see.


Hal