Comments on: Ruby versus Smalltalk, a useless comparison

By: Omer Raviv

Omer Raviv — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:44:11 +0000

The solution to the REXML performance problem, by the way, is simple. Use one of the libxml2 wrappers under Linux. Or, if you’re running under Windows and don’t care about interoperability, use MSXML via the ‘winole32’ library (included in the Ruby distribution). There’s even a pre-made wrapper for these COM objects with the Ruby 1.8.4 Windows installer – look up ‘xml.rb’ in your Ruby directory.

By: Madhu

Madhu — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:00:28 +0000

Your comment that high performance VM development is hard work is an important one. The ability to easily leverage someone elses hard work seems to gloss over much of the magic that is going on. The result is a tendency of some to trivialize high performance and even argue that it is unecessary.

It’s true that a lot of code can be written in any language with any level of performance. Often, these are trivial examples, but the backbone of the information age requires some really fast stuff built by some really smart people. Unfortunately, these people are often forgotten because they don’t get a lot of publicity.

By: petrilli

petrilli — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 15:45:21 +0000

I spoke too soon. It looks like Ruby runs directly off the parse tree. Wow.

By: petrilli

petrilli — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 15:41:14 +0000

As far as I know, Ruby does what Python does, compiles down to byte-codes and then executes them on a “virtual machine”. Perl does this, most do. I could be totally wrong, and if so, woops, but I’m not sure how else you could do it without ending up with some massively ugly code.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 09:31:06 +0000

I wasn’t aware that Ruby (in its current released versions) even had a VM to be optimised!

By: petrilli

petrilli — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 05:02:07 +0000

Well, as someone pointed out to me on the Smalltalk IRC channel, the VM underlying VisualWorks (my Smalltalk of choice) has had 20 years of development, if not more, by the smartest people in the world. It’s sad to say that these sort of things are truly hard work, and so I don’t hold out a lot of hope.

This is not to say Ruby is “slow” or “too slow”, just simply that it’s different. People should always work in what they feel productive because in most cases, developer time is the most precious commodity.

By: Vincent Foley

Vincent Foley — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 03:49:25 +0000

It will be interesting to see if Ruby’s performance improve with Ruby 2.0 and the new VM (YARV).