From: "Paul E.C. Melis" <paul@...>
Date: 2002-07-26T07:09:59+09:00
Subject: Opinion on Ruby maturity, the missing things

Hello all,

The post by John Knight about Ruby vs. Python maturity seemed to focus just
on that, Ruby vs. Python. And since everybody probably has a strong personal
reason for using Ruby (mine is the builtin regexps and happy syntax),
there's also reasons for _not_ using it. Here's my short personal view of
Ruby's maturity in terms of what's missing. I feel these two points are
showstoppers for Ruby from really becoming widely accepted:

1) it's not embeddable.

If you've ever tried using Ruby for, say, doing input text parsing (one of
it's incredible strengths) in your C/C++ program (think config file or
similar), then you know it's very difficult to embed Ruby cleanly into your
app (I've tried and failed).

2) there's no (bytecode) compiler.

Commerical applications will not use Ruby until there's a way to guard Ruby
code from being used by others. The possibility of compiling scripts to
bytecode would be a great leap forward in this respect.

Any comments?
And yes, I know about Rite, but I'm just trying to start some discussion on
maturity here...

Regards,
Paul