From: Harpo <invalid@...>
Date: 2006-07-18T00:35:11+09:00
Subject: Re: How to speed up ruby and make it as fast as possible

(sorry for my poor english)

Jamal Mazrui wrote:

> Certainly, Ruby performance is not always a problem.  It may not even
> be
> a problem in most situations.

Language performance is not a problem in many situations. 

> The issue arises enough on the list, 
> however, that, combined with personal experience, I am convinced it is
> a
> significant problem.  I think Ruby has few problems compared to other
> languages, but this is probably its biggest one.

you are 'convinced', you 'think', 'probably' ...
Many people were convinced of things which are false or at least not
true, I was too. It doesn't worth benchmarks.

> Quantifying it more 
> than that is difficult, and should not be necessary for it to be
> acknowledged as a valid concern.

Quantifying is not that difficult for some specialized use of a
language, Ruby is a general purpose language.
If you use it for scripting, say something like scanning logs, it
doesn't even worth spending 1 day benchmarking to know which of Ruby,
Perl & friends will save or lose 1 millisecond of CPU time in a year.
For desktop application, if the user have it's response in a tenth of a
second instead of 2 tenth of a second you don't save half of the time,
you just do not save nothing for obvious reasons.

> Since the message that began this thread asked how to speed up Ruby
> programs, it was obviously a problem for that author.  Also, if it was
> not a problem, why would speed improvement be a major goal of
> YARV/Ruby 2?

In some circumstances, a very good speed is appreciable.
In many circumstances, it's anecdotal, when responsiveness is desired,
it's better to focus on software design, language usage and many other
things etc.
Anyway, it's always better to have speed, everything else being equal.

Now, please come back to the subject of the thread, 'speed up ruby'.
Ruby is a language, not a program, a parser or something like this, a
language is defined by its syntax, its semantic etc., not by an
implementation.
Ruby goodness is in it's design, it seems to be well designed (well
written too, I read part of the sources), the focus semms to be on the
language, not on the implementation. You can change a parser, you
cannot change a language in its semantics so easily.

-- 
fr : http://patrick.davalan.free.fr/
en : http://harpo.free.fr/