From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2001-11-28T17:07:07+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26751] Re: Vote in the current poll!

On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Rik Hemsley wrote:

> > 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.
> 
I agree that its a good strategy.

> 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 ?
> 
Call me an optimist but I would definitely think so. At least close. But
IMHO, it depends on the amount of resources (basically brainpower) we can
get to work on the really hard problems.

Regards,

Robert