From: Erik Terpstra <erik@...>
Date: 2002-02-20T05:37:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Compiled companion language for Ruby?

Sean Russell wrote:

> Erik Terpstra wrote:
>
> > What programming language would you recommend when you need certain
> > parts of your project written in an optimized compiled language?
>
> I've been thinking about using Haskell for this; all other (non-lispish) OO

Haskell as an optimized compiled language? I'd doubt that, maybe for domain
specific solutions, or algorithms that gain a lot by Haskell's 'lazy
evaluation'. But just Ruby will usually be faster (see also:
http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/craps.shtml).
OCaml (as Matthew Diephouse suggested) or Lisp/Scheme would probably be more
interesting in terms of speed.

Anyway Haskell, OCaml, Lisp and Scheme are (in my opinion) all on a higher
level than Ruby. I am looking for a good companion language on a lower level,
for writing stuff like i.e. games, window managers, device drivers, parsers,
multimedia applications etc. Stuff you would normally use C for.

> languages rather pale in comparison to Ruby for me now, so I'm thinking it
> would be interesting to use a functional language for this -- go the whole
> nine yards and try to get the most out of the different platforms.  My only
> concern is that I'm not sure how well it would mesh, if you know what I
> mean.

I suppose your concern is how all the components written in different languages
can work together? Funny you'd ask, because you solved that particular problem
for me by writing REXML. My company uses several languages in a project, for
example: Perl, PHP, EcmaScript and Ruby. The components communicate to each
other using XML over standard Unix pipes or http. Components written in Ruby
receive their data in a REXML DOM, do their thing and write their result back
as XML. Most projects use a REST architecture, see:

http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/FrontPage
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2002/02/06/rest.html

 Erik.