From: Charles Johnson <charles.johnson@...>
Date: 2009-05-13T23:39:27+09:00
Subject: Re: what could be improved in Ruby for Science?


On May 13, 2009, at 8:35 AM, Diego Virasoro wrote:

> Hello,
> I've noticed that languages such as Python are becoming more and more
> fashionable with the Scientific communities, along side more hard core
> classics like Fortran and Java.
>
> Diego
>
With the advent of ruby 1.9.1, the only advantage here at ACCRE of  
fortran, c and c++ is speed. The multi-threaded, multi-processor,  
multi-node jobs that we see could just as easily be done in ruby with  
the appropriate library support. However, the fortran libs that do  
FFT, say, have been honed over the last 40 years to provide speeds  
only slightly slower than code done in assembler. Ruby, java, python  
simply do not offer that. That does not mean that ruby could not be  
used to *drive* such code. As more and more people in our science  
departments discover the advantages of using ruby to access pre-built,  
pre-optimized libs the move to using ruby will continue.

Cheers--

Charles
---
Charles Johnson
Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education
Vanderbilt University