From: Mohit Sindhwani <mo_mail@...>
Date: 2010-10-06T12:54:44+09:00
Subject: Re: how can we make a ruby compiler

  On 5/10/2010 8:02 AM, Tony Arcieri wrote:
> Perhaps the most straightforward answer for wanting a Hiphop or
> Starkiller-like compiler is FOR SPEED! For example, you're a company on the
> scale of Facebook who has written a large web site in a dynamic language and
> suddenly realize you could be saving a lot of money on servers if your app
> ran a lot faster. Source translation to C++ is a potential way to go
>
> I don't think that applies to anyone who uses Ruby, though. Maybe Twitter...

If you get to that scale (and are hopefully making money by then or have 
very large investments that match your scale of users/ traffic), there 
is a high chance that you will need to re-architect or rewrite a bunch 
of stuff - I don't think source translation will solve the problem.

On the other hand, Speed is an objective is something I am very keen 
on... I think there's a bunch of stuff that we do which is acceptable in 
Ruby but I would prefer it to run faster in some cases.  However, I have 
often found that Ruby lets me do the first prototype fast and once the 
system is mature, if the speed is needed (not desired), a rewrite in C++ 
is not that difficult - it should be noted that I'm not a super-advanced 
Ruby programmer... what that means is that I tend to write Ruby code 
that avoids the advanced constructs of Ruby, making translation to C++ 
easier.

Cheers,
Mohit.
5/10/2010 | 5:10 PM.