From: Dan Doel <djd15@...>
Date: 2003-08-22T02:39:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Rite/Ruby2.0 & Ruby vs OCaml

Ben Giddings wrote:

> Mauricio Fern�ndez wrote:
>
>> IIRC the "interpreter" (AST based) will be dumped.
>
>
> Hmm, will this affect the startup time?  My understanding is that one 
> of the reasons Java is so slow to start up is the VM setup.
>
> Ben 


I think the main reason Java startup is slow is that it has to load 
several megabytes of standard library classes.

The ruby standard library is quite a bit smaller, I think, so the hit 
shouldn't be the same.  It shouldn't really
take any more time to start up a virtual machine than an interpreter, as 
the only difference is that the VM
runs bytecode (more like machine code), while the interpreter runs the 
source more-or-less directly (yes,
that's a bit of a  simplification).

- Dan