From: Jon Harrop <jon@...>
Date: 2007-05-30T20:30:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby & OCaml (was Re: Underscore)

Mauricio Fernandez wrote:
> Indeed; I was just illustrating a part of Ruby's object model (mixins)
> with OCaml code.

Right.

> BTW, is {1.. n} a F# range comprehension or have you written some camlp4
> extension that looks like that (or is it only pseudocode)?

Both. Native to F# and I think someone implemented it as a camlp4 macro for
OCaml. However, containers are not derived from sequences in OCaml as they
are in F#. You'd have to wrap them in objects yourself and people aren't
likely to do that. For one thing, lists are slower in F# as a consequence.

> On a rather old box, ocaml runs that in 0.28s (vs. Ruby's 0.61s with
> #each,
> #1.8s with inject), and an imperative expansion (with for and a ref) in
> #0.17s,
> so the ratios are
>  fold_left/inject     6.4X
>  imperative           3.6X
> HOFs in Ruby are often more expensive than they would be in OCaml because
> method and especially block (anonymous function) calls are quite slow.
> 
> However, on Ruby 1.9, still under development and expected to be released
> by xmas 2007:
> 
> $ ruby19 -v bm.rb
> ruby 1.9.0 (2007-02-07 patchlevel 0) [i686-linux]
>                 user     system      total        real
> each        0.230000   0.000000   0.230000 (  0.228493)
> inject      0.310000   0.000000   0.310000 (  0.313735)
> 
> making it comparable to OCaml's bytecode, which is hardly surprising since
> they are both stack machines with threaded code/computed gotos.

Yes. Is there a native-code compiler for Ruby in the works? Does the .NET
implementation give much better performance?

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/?usenet