[ruby-talk:02199] Re: Scripting and OO -- thought question

David Douthitt writes:
> | Clemens Hintze <[e-mail]> wrote:

...

> | 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...

Hey, I do not knock it! I also have written some fine things in sh,
cut, awk and grep. My point was only that this kind of programming I
would consider as scripting. sh, ksh, bash or tcsh can do much
things. But most of them only with help of other programs like awk!
Ruby, Perl or Python do not need this kind of help.

So no reason to knock ... Only in Ruby and consorten I am
*programming*, whereas in ksh and friends I am *scripting* ... :-)))

But this is not meant as putting one above the other, though!

> | 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.

This I find very strange now! Some years before I had written all my
tools in sh with help of cut, grep and awk. But one day, I had tried
to do a task in Perl because awk has a silly limitation for only 10
files opened at a time (at least the version I've used that time).

I cannot describe my astonishment as I found that my tool's speed was
increased incredibly! So I had tried the same again and again,
translate many of my tools to Perl. All were much faster
afterwards. That was the reason for me to switch over to Perl.

The same experiences were made by my colleagues after I have convinced
them to give Perl a try for theirs tools.

Now I have found Ruby at least as fast as Perl. Sometimes even
faster. Now you tell me that your ksh-grep-mixture is faster then
Ruby??? Wow! I am really astonished.

> 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!)

Hmm ... would you mind to post or send both your Ruby program and your
ksh script to me. I am really interested in this situation where a ksh
script is faster then a Ruby program.

...

\cle

-- 
Clemens Hintze  mailto: [e-mail]