From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@...>
Date: 2002-09-26T22:54:30+09:00
Subject: Re: adding overload to ruby

Hi All,

I sense that this discussion is related to a previous question, "Has a    
'Scripting Language' Been Used for Real Business/Corporate World
(read: large-scale) Applications?"

Also a person asked before that since there is no compile-time type
checking, probably that is what hinders a "scripting language" from being
used in large scale corporate development.

We all know the facts that large-scale software, including Ruby  
itself, currently is almost always written in C, C++, or Java.  (Yes,
probably there are others, such as Eiffel, but I don't know.)  And we see
that these "large-scale software" languages all have type
declarations.  We all know the benefits of type declaration, although it
usually increases the development time.

Now, I think we have two options.  First, it seems that some people
(myself included) are really interested in doing large scale software
development in Ruby.  This has resulted in the discussion on "private
variables" among other things.  Now, we are discussing
"overloading".  This is good, but the only problem is that if we keep
adding more complexity (read: not language library) to the language
itself, I think we are doing the same thing to Ruby what has happened to C
by C++.

The second option is we do not change Ruby too much, and we leave large   
scale software development problem to the core by writing the core in C,  
C++, or Java (with JRuby) and use Ruby more on the interface.  Surely we
don't like to write in C/C++/Java, but from performance alone (Java may be
excluded), probably it is the right thing to do.

Finally, since people love writing in Ruby so much, probably more research
should be done on how to ultimately create a translator from Ruby to, say,
C.  Even the rb2c web page
(http://easter.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~hiwada/ruby/rb2c/) states that you can
get scripts run "a little bit faster".

Regards,

Bill