From: Joe Cheng <code@...>
Date: 2003-10-02T13:45:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Article on ARTIMA

> Personally, I think he's basically correct (the talkback comment), but
> in practice I don't think it's that big of a problem for most Ruby
> users.
> For some, it is.  In particular, Ruby's performance is abysmal (at least
> when compared to Perl, Python, Java, C#, etc.)  As I said though, for
> many of the things that people use Ruby for, this isn't an issue (or
> they write c/c++ extension modules for performance critical code).

If people are indeed writing C/C++ extension modules for performance
reasons, that would seem to indicate that people are using Ruby for tasks
where performance is at least somewhat important.

On the other hand, if people are not using Ruby for things where performance
is an issue, that still doesn't mean Ruby doesn't stand to gain a whole lot
by improving its performance.  Back when Java performance really stunk (i.e.
pre-Hotspot), you could've said "performance isn't a big problem for most
Java users".  Now that it is (relatively) fast and has a well-behaved
garbage collector, people are using Java for everything from backend order
processing to mail servers.

I've been working on an IMAP server for Java for awhile, but have never
found the time to finish it.  If I had written it in Ruby I might've
finished it already, but the speed and threading issues (real or perceived)
scare me enough to keep me from choosing Ruby for that particular project.