From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2006-07-15T05:31:06+09:00
Subject: Re: How to speed up ruby and make it as fast as possible

From: "Simon Kr�ger" <SimonKroeger@gmx.de>
> Bill Kelly wrote:
>
>> Did I leave anything out?
>
> Just because you asked: yes.
>
>> As I mentioned, ruby is _already_ fast enough for some
>> applications, and _will never be_ fast enough for others.
>
> There would be even more applications ruby would be fast
> enough for if ruby would just be a little bit faster.

Yes... but the reason I stated it in terms of limits,
was to show that what you're saying will always be true.

No matter how fast ruby gets, there will always be even
more applications ruby would be fast enough for if ruby
would just be a little bit faster.  (Although, as
programmers, we are very very used to needing to optimize
our software to be just a little bit faster in any
language... So if software is 'almost' fast enough to
work in ruby, usually we do the same thing in ruby that
we would do in C or Java, etc... find a way to optimize
it to be 'fast enough'.)

> I don't get the problem with someone who wishes ruby to
> be even better (yes, that means faster this time, performance
> is one quality of software, along with a lot of others)
> than it already is.

I don't see a problem with wishing ruby were better or
faster, either.  Believe me... I do an awful lot of
wishing that I could write a whole 3D game in ruby.
I'm wishing that most every day...

But in practical terms, there will almost certainly
always be some set of applications too demanding to
be written in 100% ruby.

So..... ?

a. Who thinks it would be nice if ruby were faster?

   (Whole room raises hands.)

b. Who can estimate, based on progress with YARV, and
   historical speed gains of Smalltalk VM's, how much
   faster ruby is likely to _ever_ get, compared to its
   current performance?

   (2x?  4x?  8x? ....?)

c. Who has anything new to add that would help the folks
   already working on making ruby faster?


Regards,

Bill