From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-07-26T23:24:07+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C

Peter Hickman wrote:
 > We are talking about two different things here. I was talking about
> performance as being the number 1 absolute top priority, you are talking
> about 'reasonable performance'. As far as I am concerned for those
> scripts that I don't convert to C Perl, Ruby and Python are fast enough.
> Other people think that they are not, they seem to expect the sort of
> performance C gives when they write things in a scripting language. I
> think that they are barking.

I quite agree with this. To Nutter's point, one can make one's own 
choice between C and Java once the decision has been made to write 
platform-level code. But most code, perhaps nearly all code, should stay 
in dyntyped script, in order to optimize the development/runtime 
cost-balance. I think you can get tremendous benefits from factoring 
code cleverly enough to keep the native-code components as small as 
possible. And this is often a nontrivial exercise because it depends on 
a good understanding of where performance costs come from in any 
particular program.

To the point about Java: as I mentioned upthread, working-set size is 
often the key limiting factor in Ruby performance. On a large and busy 
server (which is my target environment most of the time), Java can be a 
very inappropriate choice for the same reason!

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