From: Ashley Moran <work@...>
Date: 2006-07-27T04:27:57+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C


On Jul 26, 2006, at 8:03 pm, Chad Perrin wrote:

> This recent mania for VMs is irksome to me.  The same benefits can be
> had from a JIT compiler, without the attendant downsides of a VM (such
> as greater persistent memory usage, et cetera).

Chad,

I'm late to this conversation but I've been interested in Ruby  
performance lately.  I just had to write a script to process about  
1-1.5GB of CSV data  (No major calculations, but it involves about 20  
million rows, or something in that region).  The Ruby implementation  
I wrote takes about 2.5 hours to run - I think memory management is  
the main issue as the manual garbage collection run I added after  
each file goes into several minutes for the larger sets of data.  As  
you can imagine, I am more than eager for YARV/Rite.

Anyway, my question really is that I thought a VM was a prerequisite  
or JIT?  Is that not the case?  And if the YARV VM is not the way to  
go, what is?

Ashley