From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2001-10-30T05:46:29+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23751] Re: Some inspirations from REBOL

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Michael Neumann wrote:

> Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Well, I did not spent much time with optimizing it. But compressing a
> 5.3 MB large file with a blocksize of 4000 bytes using BWT (without any
> other compression algorithm like RLE) took on my PC (Athlon 1000) 9 min.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to profile the program anf implement the
most commonly called functions in C.

This way, there are no dependencies on external libs, but speed remains
reasonable.

Paul