From: Julian Snitow Date: 2003-04-18T10:09:10+09:00 Subject: Re: Need IO Optimization help Michael Campbell wrote: > --- Jim Freeze wrote: > >>On Friday, 18 April 2003 at 3:19:08 +0900, Michael Campbell wrote: >> >>>>>>>In my experience, the fastest way to access files (by far) >> >>is >> >>>>mmap. >>> >>> >>>Jim, I may be mis-remembering, but wasn't your original >>>task/goal/test to compare perl, ruby, (and others) at IO? If so, >>>isn't using Ruby+C extensions....cheating, somehow? >> >>Why would this be cheating? > > > As I said, I may not understand what you are trying to do. But if > you're comparing perl to ruby, compare perl to ruby, not perl to ruby > + C. If you "win" with ruby + C, could you not do the exact same > enhancement with perl, and end up where you started? > [snipt] Well, for one thing, writing C extensions for ruby is remarkably easy (not sure how perl compares in that regard). And, for me, at least, the ability to painlessly add low-level extensions when necessary translates directly into a real-world performance benefit. Of course, for benchmarking purposes, if you're writing C extensions in ruby, it's only fair to do the same in perl... and compare the final results in terms of runtime, and programmer time... ;-)