Article on ARTIMA

ruby-talk
1

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).

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Kingsley [mailto:kingsley@icecode.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 5:05 PM
To: ruby-talk ML; bobx@linuxmail.org
Subject: Re: Article on ARTIMA

Well I don’t know if this comment is factually correct or whether it is
just a
re-iteration of an anti-ruby chinese whisper.

But If David Garamond the author is right in what he says, then I would
much
prefer people to aknowledge this and work to improve it, than retort
with
over-exaggerated claims about how wrong he is.

Positive criticism should be welcomed, embraced and seen as an
opportunity for
advancement.

Thats my thoughts anyway

Kingsley

On Tuesday 30 September 2003 22:19, Bob X wrote:

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?

2

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.