From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2002-02-22T02:38:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Compiled companion language for Ruby?

Erik Terpstra wrote:

> 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).

Interesting.  I don't know much about Haskell, except that it falls in that 
domain of languages I don't understand very well (that, and ML).

I was under the impression that Haskell was compiled, not interpreted, which 
would impart speed.  On the Haskell page, it mentions that Haskell, in the 
past, suffered from speed issues, but I thought they were comparing to C.  
There's a lot of room between C and Ruby, speed-wise.

The benchmarks page is interesting.  I haven't played with the settings 
much, but it does appear that Ruby is faster than Haskell.

> 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.

Ah.  I was thinking about the speed issue, for optimizing parts of 
applications.

> 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

I'm glad to hear that.

No, I was thinking about how one would access a Haskell-derived shared 
library from Ruby directly; no IPC involved.  Again, I was thinking about 
the problem from a perspective of speed, not access to low-level functions.

-- SER