From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-07-27T04:59:13+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C

Ashley Moran wrote:
> 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).

I've had tremendous results optimizing Ruby programs that process huge 
piles of text. There is a range of "tricks" you can use to keep Ruby 
from wasting memory, which is its real downfall. If it's possible, given 
your application, to process your CSV text in such a way that you don't 
store any transformations of the whole set in memory at once, you'll go 
orders of magnitude faster. You can even try to break your computation 
up into multiple stages, and stream the intermediate results out to 
temporary files. As ugly as that sounds, it will be far faster.

In regard to the whole conversation on this thread: at the end of the 
day, absolute performance only matters if you can put a dollar amount on 
it. That makes the uncontexted language comparisons essentially 
meaningless.

In regard to YARV: I get a creepy feeling about anything that is 
considered by most of the world to be the prospective answer to all 
their problems. And as a former language designer, I have some reasons 
to believe that a VM will not be Ruby's performance panacea.

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