From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2006-07-15T08:59:05+09:00
Subject: Re: How to speed up ruby and make it as fast as possible

Jamal Mazrui wrote:
> I think you've hit the nail on the head:  execution speed is apparently
> a sore spot in the Ruby community, one that results in undue
> defensiveness and shooting the messenger!  From my reading, Perl and
> Python are the primary competitors to Ruby among programming languages
> at this time.  I prefer the elegance of Ruby, and want it to be chosen
> over the others when potential users are making such a decision.
> Whereas Python cannot change its indentation requirement (and remain
> Python) and Perl (version 5) cannot change its messiness, I believe Ruby
> is capable of reaching a comparable level of execution speed.  Solving a
> problem is usually better accomplished by acknowledging it openly rather
> than causing people to feel like they have committed heresy or stupidity
> by raising it.

The real point is: Speed is only a problem if you think it is.

I've used Ruby for more than six years, and have never had a
problem with speed.

What annoys me is people getting in my face and saying that
I'm "ignoring the problem." I'm not. For my purposes so far,
there isn't a problem.

Everyone, nyself included, would like Ruby to be faster.

But I don't condone alarmists running around squawking about
their own problems as if they were everybody's problems.

Some people find Ruby "unusable" because of its speed. Those
people should use something else until Ruby is fast enough.
(And/or they should contribute to making Ruby faster.)

However: Many, many people don't find Ruby "unusably slow."
As I said, I have never had an application where Ruby's
speed was a real problem. (Once, four years ago, I had an
app that took several minutes to run. But it needed to run
very rarely. If I were running it several times a day, then
it might be an issue.)

So in short, anyone is welcome to consider Ruby "slow" in
a given context. But don't say that it's "slow" in every
context, or that there is a "problem" that I'm "ignoring."


Hal