From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2010-01-27T00:05:12+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby bounties--list of bounties

On 26 Jan 2010, at 08:17, Tony Arcieri wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 5:36 AM, Eleanor McHugh <
> eleanor@games-with-brains.com> wrote:
> 
>> I implore Ruby developers to write in Pure Ruby and demand all these Ruby
>> Implementors solve their "performance" problems ;p
>> 
> 
> The problem with this attitude is that you eschew some great, robust
> libraries that are already out there that solve complex problems.  Parsing
> XML is a bitch.  Fortunately, there are already some great libraries to do
> this.  There's the libxml2 library, which Nokogiri uses, and Java ships with
> some great XML libraries to.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy low-level munging as much as the next hacker. But given the choice between scripting libraries written in C and having Ruby performance comparable to C I'd take the latter every time.

> Will we ever see a pure Ruby library as robust and powerful as these (all
> performance considerations aside)?  REXML certainly isn't there yet.  Is it
> really worth writing a library in pure Ruby when robust libraries already
> exist that Ruby can tap into?

The same argument applies to anything new. Why replace something which appears perfectly suited to a given task with a new, shiny, probably flawed and ill-conceived alternative? Because that's how we get better tools than the ones we currently have and are able to tackle new tasks that our existing understanding fails to even identify.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason