From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2006-09-04T20:03:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming

On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 01:01:53PM +0900, Alvin Ryder wrote:
> David Vallner wrote:
> >
> > Speaking purely theorethically, Ruby can not be made as performant as
> > Java or C# could be made if they had ideally performing implementations.
> > Latent typing makes it almost impossible to do certain optimizations as
> > static typing does. That's pure fact. Of course, it's not saying Ruby
> > can't be fast enough - but there have been people with more experience
> > at the performance side of software development that talked much better
> > about that
> 
> I'm not sure how fast or slow Ruby is but if it's as fast as Perl I'll
> be happy enough. Yes I know C is faster but I need fast development
> times too.

Based on what I've heard/seen/experienced, Ruby is generally somewhat
slower than Python which is, in turn, somewhat slower than Perl.
Generally.  On average.  For some definition of "average".  One of the
nice things about Perl's relative maturity is the significant work that
has gone into performance concerns for the parser/runtime.  I have no
doubt that Ruby will eventually match Perl for general-case performance,
but I also have no doubt that on the whole it has not matched it yet.

On the other hand, the difference is not so great that execution
performance is a factor I really take into account when choosing between
the two languages for a given project.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to
build programs out of the wrong concepts." - Paul Graham