David G. Andersen wrote: > > If we had a superfast matrix class, it would give (a) along > with decreasing the runtime by a factor of ten or so. Sounds > reasonable. The same test in matlab would be about 1/4 the lines of > code and 20x faster if implemented the way it should be. Great! Then put all C-solutions from the shootout into an extension and call them from Ruby. This way, Ruby would have the second place in runtime after C and the 1st in LOC count. > > The shootout _is_ useful for understanding some general > aspects of the languages, and for looking for things that > you might want to really work on speeding up (say, for > instance, the fact that Ruby's hash accesses seem to be > about 1/2 the speed of Perl's. ;-) It is not even clear that this is really the hash-access. It could be the GC, the loop or who knows what...