From: grocery_stocker <cdalten@...>
Date: 2008-06-23T23:58:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

On Jun 23, 7:24 am, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <zn...@cesmail.net>
wrote:
> Roger Pack wrote:
> >> YARV and Ruby's poor computational performance. Zed said, and I quote:
>
> >>> I?ll be honest right away though and say that Ruby is slow. The  
> >>> Ruby community has been ignoring the huge ?performance? elephant  
> >>> standing in the room and they need to start talking about it so it  
> >>> goes away. Elephants hate being talked about. There are a few  
> >>> efforts to make Ruby faster, but I see a lot less action than is  
> >>> needed to solve the problem. One solution in the works is a real  
> >>> virtual machine called Rite (or YARV depending on who you talk to)  
> >>> which is showing some real promise and seems to be speed  
> >>> competitive with the fastest Java implementations.
>
> > Yeah I have come to the sad conclusion that, at least with the 1.8.x
> > world, if speedy execution is your goal you should probably choose
> > another scripting language [python+psycho comes to mind].  Especially
> > when considered in conjunction with rails.  There I have mentioned the
> > elephant :)
> > That being said, thankfully 95% of web pages and scripts don't really
> > care about getting hammered, since they never will be.  But the other 5%
> > will suffer until this gets figured out.  And I'm not volunteering.
> > Hopefully this will improve in the near future.  Until then back to my
> > coding of some poorly performing, elegantly written web pages.
> > -R
>
> Well, Zed's rant *was* published some time ago -- before the 1.9.0
> release, I think. I know very little has changed in the MRI performance
> arena, but "Rite" and "YARV" are the same thing as far as I know and
> are/is indeed faster at the core than MRI.
>
> As far as Rails is concerned, though, quite a bit of work is available
> on the web on hacks for tuning it, things to avoid in your Ruby code,
> etc. I suspect there is more that *isn't* publicly available on tuning
> Rails.
>
> The way I interpret open source licenses, if you take an open source
> toolset, squeeze all the major bottlenecks out of it and put it into
> production in a server, there's no requirement for you to release the
> source of your hacks as long as you don't attempt to distribute the
> resulting binaries. :)
>
> I've speculated a bit on what I think might happen in my blog.

I could be wrong, but I believe that only applies to the BSD license.
Not the GNU one.

Chad