From: Alex Young <alex@...>
Date: 2006-05-23T16:15:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
> 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.
Maybe you're the one to ask then.  With all the talk of VMs, everyone 
seems to make the comparison to Java and Python.  Surely Lisp is a 
better comparison?  Lisps can be stupid fast (as mentioned in another 
response to this thread), so what does Lisp do right that Ruby doesn't?

-- 
Alex