Hey,

It's faster, easier and more enjoyable to write better, cleaner,  
easier-to-understand code. ;-)

Julian.


On 13/08/2005, at 12:27 AM, Bradley Kite wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm a relatively new Ruby programmer, I am curious as to what Ruby is
> trying to achieve that other scripting languages do not already  
> offer (Apart
> from the syntactic differences of yet another scripting language,  
> that is).
> The reason I ask is that it must offer something that is worth a  
> lot considering
> it runs twice as slowly as Perl (see below).
>
> I was also interested in comparing the performance of Ruby against  
> something
> like Perl, and (although this test is VERY simple) thought that I'd  
> benchmark
> a simple counter in both Ruby and Perl. The number that it counts to
> is arbitrary,
> I started with 4294967296 and kept reducing it because I got bored  
> of waiting).
> Code is provided below.
>
> Any way, on a 3Ghz P4 CPU, I got the following results:
>
> Perl:
> real    0m24.569s
> user    0m24.499s
> sys     0m0.068s
>
> Ruby:
> real    0m57.218s
> user    0m57.108s
> sys     0m0.109s
>
> (Just out of interest I did it in C as well):
>
> (Average Run, non-optimised)
> real    0m0.142s
> user    0m0.136s
> sys     0m0.005s
>
> (Average Run, -O3 optimisations):
> real    0m0.074s
> user    0m0.070s
> sys     0m0.004s
>
> ##################################
>
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> my $num = 0;
>
> while ($num < 94967295)
> {
>     $num += 1;
> }
>
> ###############
>
> #!/usr/bin/ruby
> num = 0
>
> while num < 94967295 do
>     num += 1
> end
>
> ###############
>
> int main()
> {
>     int counter = 0;
>
>     while (counter < 94967295)
>     {
>         counter += 1;
>     }
> }
>
>