From: Jamal Mazrui <Jamal.Mazrui@...>
Date: 2006-07-15T00:53:03+09:00
Subject: Re: How to speed up ruby and make it as fast as possible

-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Sibilev [mailto:ksruby@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 11:13 AM

>  I find this attitude is quite amazing. We all know that Ruby is not a
>  best language in terms of performance. Even if we had Ruby 2.0 (YARV)
>  delivered to us, Ruby's performance would still be a way behind those
>  strong typed languges like ocaml or java. If you want to keep using
>  Ruby, but sometimes you need a raw performance, you should learn C.
>  It's not that bad, you know. If you always need a raw performance,
>  then probably you are not using right tool for the job.


Here we go again .... ... characterizing my preferences in the extreme
and telling me to learn another language if I'm not happy with something
about Ruby.  <smile> Execution speed can be important without being the
most important priority of an application.  I like enough about Ruby to
use it and subscribe to this mailing list.  I want to do more
development With Ruby, but performance-related issues are making me opt
for Perl or Python sometimes.  they are also scripting languages, much
easier to learn and use than strongly typed languages.  In these cases,
they can deliver adequate performance even though not the speed of C or
Java.  

I already know PowerBasic, which performs comparably to C, so I can
write DLLs with that compiler if needed.  That is a work-around,
however, not an optimal solution.  I would try YARV now, but understand
that it only works with Ruby 1.9, not the 1.84 version that is stable
for producing and distributing applications to others.  Like the Perl 6
developers, the Ruby 2 developers are apparently reluctant to commit to
any timelines, so it is difficult to make investments in programming
time for some projects with such vagueness about what tools will be
available when.

Jamal