From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2003-10-01T09:00:51+09:00 Subject: Re: Article on ARTIMA Hello Bob, Tuesday, September 30, 2003, 10:19:15 PM, you wrote: >>From the talkback: BX> "Ruby is over 10 years old, very popular in Japan, gaining popularity in BX> other parts of the world, have thousands of users and hundreds of hackers. BX> However, the implementation (Ruby has only 1 currently, written in C) is BX> pretty weak. It's slow, does not support native threads, does not do JIT BX> compilation (not even bytecode), needs a better GC, etc. It is especially so BX> if we compare it with Java and Smalltalk, who have gotten real good BX> implementations (JIT compilers, fast GC, threads, etc) nowadays." BX> Comments? 100% ACK. The poster described the technical problems of ruby very well. And they are a reason for not choosing the language in some projects. I really don't like native threads programming at the low level that most languages offer (introduced 30 years ago - mutexes, semaphores etc). Eiffel and TCL have much better way separating threads and using message passing as the only way for communication. I wish someone would take a look at TCL how to implement it, but the current C implementation of ruby is such a hack that it is impossible to add something like this. And another thing is very important and should really be done if ruby wants to escape the hacker world: A Formal description of the language (you know the "language lawyer" section of the python documentation). JRuby and Ruby are not the same in some details and this is the result of the lack of specification. -- Best regards, Lothar mailto:mailinglists@scriptolutions.com