From: Ashley Moran <work@...>
Date: 2007-01-22T08:03:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby to java or java to ruby converter


On Jan 21, 2007, at 10:41 pm, Vinod Kone wrote:

> i understand that comparing programming languages is a non-trivial  
> issue
> and it depends on the "type of tasks" that you want the program to do.
> what we are trying to look into is how java and ruby fare w.r.t to
> different "kind" of programs..for ex: memory intensive, io intensive,
> regular expression matching etc. the benchmarks would be cpu time,
> memory usage, length of code etc etc.


Personally, I think the best use of your time (and the most important  
benchmark) would be estimating how much longer/shorter it would take  
to develop in Java/Ruby.  If the time to develop in Ruby is one week  
less, and the cost to have a developer on a job is (say) �1000, all  
you have to ask is will the Ruby version need more than �1000 of  
hardware extra to run?

I will probably recommend soon that we upgrade our web servers to 4GB 
+ RAM so we can start Mongrel clusters with impunity.  We will easily  
save the cost of that in developer hours.  Likewise with a  
particularly intensive data processing tool written in Ruby - it will  
cost far less to replace the CPU in our internal server than to  
rewrite the tool in another language.

Ashley