From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-09-05T02:48:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming

Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 01:01:53PM +0900, Alvin Ryder wrote:
>> 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".

Would you be interested in the correct definition of average in
benchmarking? Of course you would! :)

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=5673&dl=ACM&coll=&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618

> 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.

And this was one of the motivations of the Parrot team -- a common
virtual machine for Perl, Python and Ruby. The Ruby community seems to
have put a lot more effort into YARV than the Cardinal/Parrot approach.
Has the Python community similarly gone their own way, or do they plan
to use Parrot?