On Sep 25, 2005, at 10:21 AM, seekingleverage / gmail.com wrote:


> I'm wondering if anyone could shed some light on whether or not it
> would make sense to do a Freenet client in Ruby.
>
> Obviously, from an elegent code standpoint, Ruby is probably more
> manageable and in general a better all round experience.
>
> What I'm curious about though, is the execution speed of compiled Ruby
> code vs Java running on the virtual machine.
>
> Can anyone shed some light on this?
>

Java will be faster once it gets going. The load time of Java is not  
great. For example, on my OS/X laptop a simple hello world program in  
Java takes about .4 seconds to run while the ruby program takes less  
than 0.05 seconds, so you've got a 0.395 second head start on  
Java :-) And you can do quite a lot using ruby in that time. A 'real'  
Java program might take several seconds to load and, even then, it  
may not 'settle down' for many seconds after that. Once Java is  
running, say in a web server, Java will respond to events very  
quickly -- the head start only applies to a command line start-up.

Performance is rarely the primary concern. A "fast solution" these  
days seems to mean "deliver real soon" rather than "deliver something  
speedy." Anyway, if I really needed speed I wouldn't be using Java,  
I'd likely use Common Lisp (CL is a dynamic language that is much  
faster than Java -- in both senses of the word 'fast').

Cheers,
Bob


>
> Thanks,
> Phil
>
>
>
>

----
Bob Hutchison          -- blogs at <http://www.recursive.ca/hutch/>
Recursive Design Inc.  -- <http://www.recursive.ca/>
Raconteur              -- <http://www.raconteur.info/>