From: Ryan Williams <mr.cruft@...>
Date: 2006-06-03T05:13:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Speed of Ruby program != Speed of Ruby language (was Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance)

I think Dave's point is that it's irrelevant what Ruby itself is
implemented in.  The problem is that whenever performance dicussions
come up, instead of discussing how to imrpove the speed of
Ruby-the-language, people instead talk about how easy it is to use
languages other than Ruby for programs that are supposed to be fast.

Dave wants to talk about how to make fast programs that are completely
written in Ruby.  And I do too, though I have little to contribute
except to perhaps bring the discussion back in line.  Maybe we could
talk about improving the speed of the Ruby implementation, or about
improving our use of the language.  But can we have a discussion where
we pretend for a moment that we don't all want to run out and
implement things in C?

-RYaN

On 6/2/06, Logan Capaldo <logancapaldo@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 1, 2006, at 6:56 PM, Dave Howell wrote:
>
> > I find that assertion to be quite ludicrous. A C string is a null-
> > terminated byte sequence. I've happily never had to use to any
> > great extent any other language that didn't effectively insulate me
> > from any need to track the terminal null (the vast majority don't
> > even *use* that, but rather store the length as an integer at the
> > front of the string), or that allowed my code to inadvertantly
> > overwrite the terminal null, thus turning a string into an object
> > of indefinite length, sucking down whatever random bytes lay beyond
> > the end of the actual string bytes until it found some other "00x0"
> > in memory.
>
> Um, he was saying how they are _implemented_ in C.
>
>
> > You're going to have to provide some rather compelling evidence
> > before I give that opinion much credence. Ruby and Perl are "old
> > friends," too. Nevertheless, if there are aspects of Ruby that came
> > from these languages, and I cannot learn them directly and
> > exclusively via Ruby, that just says to me that the Ruby
> > documentation still needs work. When I decided that AppleScript
> > (XCode and AppleScript Studio notwithstanding) were inherently
> > inadequate for the programming I wanted to do, I selected Ruby in
> > part because of how much NOT like Perl it is.
> >
>
> He's not saying ruby was influenced by C (like it was by perl) he is
> saying C is the platform upon which ruby is built.
>
>