From: gregarican <greg.kujawa@...>
Date: 2006-07-18T04:15:15+09:00
Subject: Re: How to speed up ruby and make it as fast as possible

Good points. But I think the overall progress of this thread tends to
be:

class DeadHorse < Horse
    def turn_into_glue
        self.beat
    end
end

Harpo wrote:
> (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/