From: Jim Weirich Date: 2006-06-05T23:49:04+09:00 Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future? Tom Marsh wrote: > The first is performance. Ruby might be the same age as Java, but Java > developers are 10 a penny and that means that Ruby is more expensive, > both > in terms of the hardware required to run it, and people required to > develop > it. In order for it to get its foot in the door it needs to massively > reduce > its TCO. Hi Tom, I just wanted to respond to these two points. Although no one is arguing against improved Ruby performance, I think you overestimate the hardware issues. I find I am quite comfortable developing Rails code on my 6 year old laptop. However, I wouldn't even consider developing a non-trivial Java application on the same hardware. Although I'm talking develement and not production deployment, I think you will find that true across the board. Justin Gehtland had some numbers on comparing Ruby performance with a similar Java webapp. You can read about it here: http://blogs.relevancellc.com/articles/2005/04/04/some-numbers-at-last (looks like relevance has changed their blog software and some of the postings lost all formatting ... the words and numbers are all there, you just have to read carefullly, sorry). The summary is that the unoptimized versions of the Ruby and Java apps had very similar performance, and that it was very easy to tune the Ruby version with selective caching options. The assertion that Ruby cost more in terms of people is an interesting one as well. Although I don't have numbers for myself, Stewart Halloway has published some figures for his consulting company. They offer both Ruby and Java services and charge 10% to 50% less for Ruby jobs over Java jobs. And this is after paying Ruby developers more (about 10%). You can read about Stewart's findings here: http://blogs.relevancellc.com/articles/2005/12/19/ruby-rails-put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is http://blogs.relevancellc.com/articles/2005/12/20/bidding-projects-with-ruby-rails-take-2 -- Jim Weirich -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.