From: "Lorenzo E. Danielsson" <danielsson.lorenzo@...>
Date: 2008-01-31T03:57:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Some Questions

Giuseppe luigi Punzi ruiz wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> At the moment, I need to start some projects in my job.
>    - One, is a POS (Point of Sale) with a backend for control inventory,
> products, etc..
>    - Other, is a HelpDesk soft to control our clients.
>    - Another, is a script to do some usual task in a MSAccess database
>
> All of this, may run on Windows, Linux, and I will develop from Mac.
>
> I tought about develop it on Squeak/Smalltalk, but I would like to try
> other languaje, and, as I can see, Ruby is similar, all are object :D (I
> love OOP)
>
> At the moment, I'm not interested on web programming, RoR, or similar
> (in future, for some projects or diferent interface, probably). Then,
> this are my doubts...
>
>    - Speed: I readed about Ruby is slooooooow. I want to know if is
> veeeeryyy slooow for a Desktop application (medium, large projects).
>   
Ruby is slow for some tasks. Looking at your application list, I doubt 
that will affect you much. But no, you would not choose Ruby for Quake 5.

The best thing to do is to give it a test. I find that Gtk and Qt 
applications written in Ruby start up slower than there C/C++ 
counterparts but don't necessarily run much slower. But I don't have 
much experience with GUI programming.

Consider execution speed vs. development speed. In many cases you need 
to complete an application in a fairly short time. Ruby is good at that. 
Sometimes you need applications that run at a high speed. Ruby is not so 
good at that.

The applications you listed usually spend most of their time displaying 
a form and waiting for the user to complete forms, etc. I cannot imagine 
that Ruby is slower at waiting for a user than <any other language>.

The server side is where you could start to run into performance issues, 
at least if you have a large number of people connecting to the 
applications simultaneously. You'd have to write some small test cases, 
emulate the expected load and see how well Ruby degrades.
>    - Librarys: I need GUI building software (some portable UI? with gui
> builder?), DataBase access, 多Object Databases? there are a good
> collection of librarys for day by day? All I read about Ruby is about
> Rails.
>   
Portable toolkits: Qt, Gtk2, Tk, Swing (if you use JRuby), probably others.
>    - Support: I'm new to ruby, and I will need some help. Other lists?
> or this is the main?
>   
IRC is good. This list is good. Google is good.
> Thanks in advance for your help, and sorry for my bad english.
>   

One last thing: you stated that you need to write these applications for 
your job. As much as I love Ruby and would encourage you to learn it 
because it makes life so damn sweet, what is your time-frame? Is this 
the right time to learn a new language? If time is of the essence it 
might be advisable to stick to what you already know.

Just my thoughts,
Lorenzo