From: Ben Christensen Date: 2009-08-22T07:09:02+09:00 Subject: Re: Confirm my Performance Test Against Java? Peter, Taking your experiences one step further, wouldn't it stand to reason that if a system is being "rebuilt" with all of the lessons learned, but with the mature "faster performance" language, that it could achieve higher performance than being rebuilt in a new, less mature, "slower performance" language? Your well-founded arguments suggest that many (if not the majority of) performance issues are in poor design and implementation - not the language itself. I agree that this is often the case - I find and fix many of them in the systems I profile. A recent example was an issue causing 2 orders of magnitude in performance degradation because of absolutely horrible design - nothing to do with any type of language, platform or infrastructure. But if a system is being built by a team capable of achieving the performance gains you claim with a "slower" toolset, if given a "faster" toolset, would that same team not accomplish an even better performing end result? Of course, I'm not suggesting a difference as extreme as Assember and C - which is such a different paradigm that this comparison is very difficult to do. Current languages though are so often variations on a theme - rather than revolutionary changes in approach. For example, working with Ruby doesn't leave me feeling like I've just experienced some nirvana -- it feels like just a different approach to things that may or may not benefit certain tasks -- but principally is not so different from Java (or Groovy, Scala, C#, Python etc) as to make me feel something earth shattering has occurred. Thus, if a team equally skilled in both Ruby (and its "way" of doing things) and Java could approach a project and avoid the design pitfalls that cause most of the performance issues you have stated - then wouldn't the team accomplish higher performance with Java? Ben -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.