From: lalawawa <usenet@...>
Date: 2010-01-27T10:20:04+09:00
Subject: Distressing Doc

I was reading www.ruby-lang.org, and under "To Ruby From C and C++" it said

* As of Ruby 1.8, code is interpreted at run-time rather than compiled 
to any sort of machine- or byte-code.

which sounds like a huge disadvantage compared to other languages.  I 
did some testing and I get the impression that Ruby is compiling your 
code to some form of compiled version in ram before it runs it.

I made the following test programs

ten_million.rb:
#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

i = 10_000_000
while i > 0
     i -= 1
end

which ran in 4.9 seconds in ruby 1.8.7 on a 64 bit amd cpu

ten_million.sh
:

i=10000000

while [ $i -gt 0 ] ; do
     i=$(($i - 1))
done

which ran in 287 seconds.  Note on my machine /bin/sh is a symlink to 
/bin/dash

ten_million.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$i = 10000000;

while ($i > 0) {
     $i -= 1;
}

which ran in 2.45 seconds in perl v6.10.0

ten_million.py
#!/usr/bin/python

i = 10000000

while i > 0:
     i -= 1

which ran in 2.84 seconds on python 2.6

If Ruby wasn't being compiled, I think the run time would be comparable 
to Bourne shell.  I suspect that what they meant by that statement in 
the doc is that there is no way to SAVE the compiled version, but the 
compiled version does exist in ram.