From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-09-14T13:04:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Metaruby, BFTS, Cardinal and Rubicon - State of play?

Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> I'm even happier that it's drawing some attention to the various
>> Ruby implementations and the growing toolkit around them.
> 
> I'd be happier if Mr Tew didn't try to lend legitimacy to the alioth
> shootout. Microbenchmarks don't show anything useful, even if they're
> run correctly -- which the shootout has never been run correctly. It
> isn't even administered correctly. (I was similarly annoyed that Joel
> Spolsky used it in his latest slam on Ruby. Stupid, Joel, stupid.)
> 
> -austin
Well ... as a working performance engineer, I'm going to defend
microbenchmarks as virtually (no pun intended) the *only* way to improve
performance over all for the Ruby interpreter, coupled of course with
profiling said interpreter and careful design of the data structures the
interpreter must maintain during execution.

The simple fact is that programmers are going to write nested loops,
either explicitly a la Fortran or implicitly, for example, in

a = mat1*mat2

where mat1 and mat2 are matrices defined with "Matrix." Programmers are
going to read large files and apply regular expression transformations
to every line in those files. Programmers are going to define data
structures for real-world problems just like they do for the Tower of
Hanoi benchmark. To quote Yul Brynner, "Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."

.