From: Charles Oliver Nutter <headius@...>
Date: 2010-01-26T03:12:17+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby bounties--list of bounties

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 6:25 PM, Mike Dalessio <mike.dalessio@gmail.com> wrote:
> Charlie, you're making a great case against using FFI.

FFI is much better than writing any C code at all, due to the
security, stability, and portability problems of writing your own C
bindings. If you are permitted to load a given library and that
library is available and you *must* use that library, FFI is the only
logical choice. But it doesn't get around the fact that you need the
library you're binding to be available and loadable on your target
platform. FFI > C bindings, but [platform-independent binary] > FFI.
And that usually means Java-based.

I should also point out that you don't necessarily have to write JVM
libraries in Java; you could also use Scala or Fan or similar
languages, and it would be just as portable (albeit a bit larger due
to the runtime dependency on those languages' runtime libraries).

But yes, at the end of the day, I believe writing stuff in a portable
binary format like JVM bytecode (or CLR bytecode) is a better choice
than writing in a language that has to be recompiled for every target
system. You ought to know that already...would I be working on JRuby
if I believed any differently? :)

And yes...I'd love to be able to recommend that everyone just use Ruby
for everything. But I don't think it's simply a performance issue;
there's some pretty amazing things you can get for free with a rich
static type system.

- Charlie