From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2007-01-18T04:05:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Intensive computing: Ruby? Ruby/C? Pure C++?

Shot (Piotr Szotkowski) wrote:
> Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply, Benjohn!
>
> benjohn@fysh.org:
>
> > I'd go with prototype in Ruby, probably.
>
> And then...? I hoped a bit for the dream solution of "actually, dear
> professors, it works - if slow - for the scope of this thesis, and
> further speed improvements can be achieved by replacing more parts
> with C/C++ code". ;)
>
> > You could jump in to c++, and I think you may find useful Boost
> > libraries for the work you're going (there is a graph librarby in
> > there, I'm sure)
>
> Yeah, I heard good things about Boost, and also that wrapping one's mind
> around C++ templating is a requirement these days. Of which, the latter
> scares me (and I seem to know my limits quite well)...
>
> > but I honestly think you'll suffer if you're not a c++ Guru
>
> My thoughts exactly. The catch is my supervisor codes in C++ all his
> life, while not having any idea about script languages, so he doesn't
> really seem to easily buy mine 'I'll code both faster and be way more
> happy with Ruby/OCaml, and the finished libraries will be more-or-less
> universal anyway.'
>
> > After prototyping, a fourth way that I would strongly suggest in
> > this case, is to considder a functional language if you need speed.
>
> The catch with going OCaml (where did today go? all these
> easily-googlable tutorials and opinions were so nice to read...)
> is that I'll have to learn yet another language (and, more importantly,
> design paradigm).

LuaJIT probably won't be as fast as OCaml, but I think Lua
is easier for a Rubyist to learn.