From: Francis Cianfrocca Date: 2006-07-27T06:24:26+09:00 Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C Charles O Nutter wrote: > I would challenge the Ruby > community at large to expect more from Ruby proper before giving up the > dream of highly-performant Ruby code and plunging into the C. Much depends on what is wanted from the language. My friends know me for a person who will gladly walk a very long way to get an incremental performance improvement in any program. But I don't dream of highly-performant Ruby code. I dream of highly-scalable applications that can work with many different kinds of data seamlessly and link business people and their customers together in newer, faster, more secure ways than have ever been imagined before. I want to be able to turn almost any kind of data, wherever it is, into actionable information and combine it flexibly with any other data. I want to be able to simply drop any piece of new code into a network and automatically have it start working with other components in the (global) network. I want a language system that can gracefully and powerfully model all of these new kinds of interactions without requiring top-down analysis of impossibly large problem domains and rigid program-by-contract regimes. Ruby has unique characteristics, among all other languages that I know, that qualify it for a first approach to my prticular dream. Among these are the excellent metaprogramming support, the open classes, the adaptability to tooling, and (yes) the generally-acceptable performance. If one's goal is to get a program that will take the least amount of time to plow through some vector mathematics problem, then by all means let's have the language-performance discussion. But to me, most of these compute-intensive tasks are problems that have been being addressed by smart people ever since Fortran came along. We don't necessarily need Ruby to solve them. We do need Ruby to solve a very different set of next-generation problems, for which C and Java (and even Perl and Python) are very poorly suited. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.