From: Rasputin <rasputin@...>
Date: 2003-10-01T20:10:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Article on ARTIMA

* Bob X <bobx@linuxmail.org> [0921 22:21]:
> >From the talkback:
> 
> "Ruby is over 10 years old, very popular in Japan, gaining popularity in
> other parts of the world, have thousands of users and hundreds of hackers.
> However, the implementation (Ruby has only 1 currently, written in C) is
> pretty weak. It's slow, does not support native threads, does not do JIT
> compilation (not even bytecode), needs a better GC, etc. It is especially so
> if we compare it with Java and Smalltalk, who have gotten real good
> implementations (JIT compilers, fast GC, threads, etc) nowadays."
> 
> Comments?

None of those interest me personally, except perhaps the GC
issue - can't say I've seen that and last month I had 2 AI
tic-tac-toe players going head to head on a 425x425 board, and didn't
have problems. Each Square was an instance of a 'Square' class, and I was
running a testsuite against it so there were plenty of setup/teardown
calls to exercise GC :)

I wouldn't try to argue about performance because it's good enough
for me. I suspect most people wouldn't have a problem either.
Unfortunately it seems to be one of those pissing contest issues
like a PCs Mhz value....

For me the main concern about a language is how easy it is to write and
maintain programs in it, and Ruby kicks seven shades out of any other
language I've used for that.

(C/Java/Perl/shell/PHP/FORTRAN/V**ual B**ic).

-- 
		AMAZING BUT TRUE ...
There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it
would completely cover the Sahara Desert.
Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns