From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-07-02T12:10:47+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby vs. perl

In article <3D20A557.8010906@path.berkeley.edu>,
Joel VanderWerf  <vjoel@PATH.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>Paul Brannan wrote:
>> As interesting as this is, I don't think that for real-world
>> applications, any of it is relevant.  Most Ruby and Perl programmers
>> will rewrite a portion of code as a C extension when it is not fast
>> enough.  Given this approach, Ruby and Perl will probably perform
>> similarly for most applications.
>
>Ruby's advantage here is that the C interface is very nice. From what 
>I've heard, it's much more seamless than Perl's C interface (which I 
>admit to not having used).
>
>I use Ruby for performance-intensive numerical simulations. Because 
>Ruby's so good at quick and dirty string processing (like Perl) as well 
>as complex data structures (unlike Perl), it's a reasonable task to 
>generate C code on the fly to implement user-defined simulation 
>specifications. I'm getting performance comparable with the C 
>application that was originally used to do this work, plus advantages of 
>being able to control, inspect, etc. the simulation from Ruby code.
>

Joel,

This generating C on the fly concept sounds interesting, can you go into 
more detail?  Any code you can post?

Phil