From: Ryan Leavengood <mrcode@...>
Date: 2001-10-30T04:32:44+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23743] Re: Some inspirations from REBOL

> Maybe great, but very slow. Why not make it a standard C-extension and
> distribute it with Ruby? It would run on any platform.

Yes that is certainly a possibility.  But there is no guarantee it will
run on any platform.  But I suppose if Ruby could be ported to that
platform then that library could.  But pure Ruby is always more portable
than C.

> I've implemented LZ77, LZ78, LZW, RLE and BWT (bzip) in pure Ruby and
> they are really slow.

How slow is really slow?  Does it take seconds to process small data or
is it just a lot slower than C?  Because sure, if you compare it to
highly optimized compiled code it will be a lot slower, especially if
you write it inefficiently in Ruby (for example using += instead of <<
with Strings.)  But if it can process a meg a second or so then I think
that would be sufficient for most people.

In the long run I think we should see about making Ruby as fast as
possible so that this kind of argument cannot be used anymore.  Sure, if
you already have a library in C just create a Ruby library in C to
interface to it.  But if we are developing things anew then I certainly
would much rather use Ruby than C.  That's the whole point of Ruby isn't
it?

Ryan