From: namekuseijin <namekuseijin@...>
Date: 2010-11-04T09:55:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Perofrmance

On Nov 3, 5:04 pm, Josh Cheek <josh.ch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ruby 1.8 was, I think, the slowest widely used language in the world. They
> put a lot of work into it, and Ruby 1.9 is around 4 times faster, and is
> basically equivalent in speed to other dynamic languages

it's a very nice implementation indeed.  It's slower than Racket:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=racket

but that's because they cheat by writing with (lots) of low-level,
ugly, imperative unsafe operations, same for SBCL Lisp:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=sbcl

> That said, I still think there is hope for static languages, I just don't
> know of any right now that would be worth putting up with. And Ruby can also
> get better (especially as more people show interest in it), if Smalltalk and
> Lisp can be so fast, then I think Ruby can too.

Lisp cheats by simply pinning down types and using unsafe, low-level
fast operators when needing performance.  In other words, it trades
its dynamically typed nature for performance when needed.  and ugly,
low-level code...