From: John Browning Date: 2007-04-05T05:28:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Some General Questions about Ruby Quick answers: much slower, but for Web apps and a lot of other interactive apps where input/output itself creates lots of delays and lots of waiting, you probably don't care. It's possible to do most or all of those things in Ruby -- apart from the kernel module -- but you don't want to. One reason: an interpreted language to execute has to bring with it the whole interpreter, which makes it large. Second, which should probably be first, speed matters much more in things like peripheral drivers which lots of other programs use and thus can be chokepoints for the whole system. Ruby on Rails is slow even by the standards of Web applications. But it's still well worth learning as it makes it much easier to develop -- and more importantly to evolve -- powerful applications. Good luck. On 4 Apr 2007, at 20:50, Vinh Chuc wrote: > Hi ! > I think i'll soon begin to learn programming in ruby, as so many > people > find it ( and its buddy RoR ) awesome. > I'm a beginner programmer ( Basic, PHP, Caml, and i'm currently > reading > some C/C++ tutorials ) > > Ruby is an interpreted language, if i'm not wrong, interpreted > languages > are slightly slower than compiled ones, > so far i mainly coded web apps, but i may one day do some Desktop apps > programming, and so : are Ruby programs much slower/nearly as > fast/ ... > as a for example a C-compiled program ( i guess it depends a lot > on the > kind of software ) ?? > > About the possibilities of Ruby, i know Ruby is a generic language, > and > that we can program almost every software in Ruby, but *almost* every > for example, is it possible to develop a peripheral driver in Ruby ?? > more generally to access the hardware ? to write a linux kernel module > ?? ( i guess it is not possible to write a ruby OS kernel ) > > thank you > > ( i'm not a native english speaker, sorry if any mistakes ) > > -- > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > >