From: Seth Kurtzberg <seth@...>
Date: 2003-02-27T17:52:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Is Ruby slower?

On Thursday 27 February 2003 01:45 am, Lennon Day-Reynolds wrote:
> As an informal benchmark, the "Language Shootout" would seem to suggest
> that Ruby's method dispatch is indeed a good bit faster:
>
> http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/bench/methcall/
>
> Specifically, there's over a 2x difference in the execution time for the
> specific test used for that data. In addition, the 'Object Instantiation'
> test showed an even more dramatic difference, with Ruby almost 5x faster.
>
> Of course, to be fair, in its more traditional strong areas, (regexp
> matching, hash access, etc.) Perl shows an equal or better advantage.

That may be true, but it is a lot easier to optimize the regexp library (for 
example) than to change the instantiation and dispatching methods.

Also, it is largely not a valid comparison, as Ruby is the only language (of 
the "usual suspects" :)   ) that is in fact really OO.  So, for example, Perl 
is doing pseudo-OO more slowly than Ruby is doing real OO.

>
> So, not too surprisingly, the performance is likely to depend far more on
> the style of code you're writing, algorithms and data structures used,
> etc., than on the implementation language, at least among the "usual
> suspects" (Ruby, Perl, Python, etc.).
>
> Lennon Day-Reynolds
> lennon@day-reynolds.com
>
> On Thu, 27 Feb 2003 12:57:54 +0900
>
> ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote:
> > In article <20030227002438.GA3877@math.umd.edu>,
> >
> > Daniel Carrera  <dcarrera@math.umd.edu> wrote:
> > >Hello,
> > >
> > >I was wondering about what exactly makes Perl faster than Ruby, and I
> > > made a small test to examine this a bit.  I sort of assumed that it was
> > > because Ruby has more powerful data structures, but it seems that
> > > compile-time optimization might be a significant factor.
> >
> > Actually, at the last meeting of the Portland Rubyists we had a new
> > person show up who apparently does a lot of OO Perl and from what he
> > said, for OO programs Ruby is faster because Perl is a lot slower at
> > method dispatch. Anyone else got any data on this?
> >
> > Phil

-- 
Seth Kurtzberg
M. I. S. Corp.
480-661-1849
seth@cql.com