From: David Douthitt <DDouthitt@...>
Date: 2000-03-27T14:23:29-06:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:02193] Re: Scripting and OO -- thought question

| Clemens Hintze <c.hintze@gmx.net> wrote:

| That is difficult, I think. IMHO, your friend has a total archaic
| understanding of the term scripting. If he does not want to revise
| this understanding, he never will catch the whole truth, I fear.
| 
| His understanding seems to be from the time of the good old Bourne
| shell. In that time scripting was used to glue several programs
| together to do a more complex work.

I write some interesting programs in ksh :-)  Don't knock it...

| And the speed issue ... I think there is no such an issue, if you can
| code time critical parts in C. I strongly believe that my app using
| scripting and C together would be nearly as performant as his one
| coded in C/C++ only. And perhaps more reliable, thinking for Ruby's
| true garbage collector, for instance.

This is something I came up against already - and just in the first
two weeks :-)  I have a set of applications that were written
in Perl 4, which scan the UNIX system logs and generate color-coded
HTML pages for them.  Whether using Perl or Ruby, they take a LONG
time - especially for an application which runs every five minutes.
They also suck an incredible amount of CPU time, slowing everything
done noticibly (including terminal response time).

All they do is scan the log (41,000 lines plus) and generate HTML
files based on them.  At one time I had them (Ruby version, Perl
version) generating separate files for each system in the log;
when I switched to using ksh and grep, the speed increase was incredible.
I'm still stuck though, since scanning for one particular host
(with 41,000 lines!) can take over 3 minutes.

The application is quite simple really (two pages in Ruby) but
the speed is in the tank.  Time for GNU Smalltalk?  Scheme?
Eiffel?  Don't know.... still looking (and wanting to learn
something new!)

| Just my US$1.20. Sorry for being so verbose. I hope I had not waste
| too much bandwith :-)

Your opinions are never a waste!  Always a joy to read your posts...