From: MrZombie Date: 2010-05-10T22:10:05+09:00 Subject: Re: ease of porting (translating) ruby to C (vs. python)? On 2010-05-07 15:50:11 -0400, Seebs said: > On 2010-05-07, bwv549 wrote: >> In a very small bioinformatics group I know of, they are deciding >> whether to code mostly in python or ruby. The lead knows that python >> can "easily be ported to C because of its strictness." > > Furthermore, porting stuff from an OO language to C is almost certainly > absolutely the wrong thing to do. The correct solution might be to write > a plugin module for the language which translates specific functionality into > raw C calls for performance reasons, but if you have a design that makes any > sense at all in an OO language, translating it to C is stupid. From my understanding, both Python and Ruby are able to use native C extensions. It means you could use C for any speed-critical number-crunching function. For the sake of clarity, I'd suggest sticking to the least amount of C you can manage, and use either Python or Ruby to glue the rest together. The rest is a matter of choice and comfort. While I prefer Ruby for its flexibility, others might prefer Python for clarity. Now, understand that Python code doesn't magically make sense for those who read the source, it just enforces significant formatting that will ensure the source is uniform (at least to some extent). As the significant number-crunching could be done using C, I doubt the speed would be greatly impaired by using any of the other two languages. So yeah, that's that.