From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2003-09-22T19:34:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Performance: Ruby vs Java

Hello Lalit,

Monday, September 22, 2003, 1:48:09 AM, you wrote:

LP> I'm a newcomer to Ruby, and thought I would write a little
LP> brute-force-search program to see how Ruby compares to Java -
LP> performance wise. The results surprised me (I was hoping Ruby would
LP> fare a lot better than it did!). On my WinXP box (AthlonXP 1800+,
LP> 768Meg RAM), the Ruby program takes 1min 50secs to complete, while a
LP> similar java program takes 0.6 secs.

Ruby is the wrong language for programs like this. A speed difference
of 18000% (or 180 times) is not unusual if you try to port algorithms on large data
sets with lots of low level calculations.

Writing parsers (that can't use regular expressions) or numerical
computing are the best visible sign that ruby is dynamic and untyped.

By the way. Common Lisp will not be much slower then Java, if used
with type declarations. There is a lot of possible optimizations, but
common lisp costs around 5000$ a license. I doubt that ruby has more
then a handfull of users who wants to pay this.


-- 
Best regards,
 Lothar                            mailto:mailinglists@scriptolutions.com