From: Rik Hemsley <rik@...>
Date: 2001-11-28T16:12:30+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26748] Re: Vote in the current poll!

#if Robert Feldt
 
> I'd like to know if people, like me, would like to push Ruby as not
> only a script language but as a general programming language (sure we should 
> have both but IMHO the latter use is currently more in focus). If people
> are interested in this there would be, *hint*, more incentives to
> investigate speeding up Ruby and producing binaries. I find it hard to
> get a feel for how people use Ruby and how they would use it if it could
> be compiled to reasonably fast binaries. 

My current thinking is that a language as elegant as Ruby with the
execution speed of C is so hard to make that there's no point in
expending the effort.

Combining languages seems like a more practical idea to me. Write your
code in Ruby, but if you find bottlenecks in your code, write those bits
in C.

Yes, it's appealing to think of writing everything in Ruby, but is it
really likely that we will see Ruby running as fast as e.g. Java within
a few years ?

Personally I am happy using xmlparser instead of (nq|re)xml when I need
the extra speed (and I do - I have a 10Mb XML file here.)

Rik