On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, mortench wrote:

> I have been looking at the Ruby programming language recently. I like
> Ruby and would like to use it myself but I see some several key
> limitations that hinders use of Ruby in mainstream projects (and makes
> it hard for me to recommend it for my customers):
>
>   1. Slow and very primitve VM - no jit, vm comparable to java 10
> years ago.

I have found Ruby to generally be fast enough.  With the easy addition of 
InlineC, the critical parts can be sped up by orders of magnitude.

Having said that, there is VERY active development by some incredibly 
brilliant people to build a new VM.

So, right now it depends on how fast is fast enough for what you need.

>   2. No native thread support - this is increasingly a problem as
> threading and multi-core technology becomes the norm (*)

That's an issue for a number of folks.  It is being worked on along with 
the new VM.  I expect to see something soon.

>   3. No (first-class) unicode support (*)

Many of the Ruby developers are Japanese.  I will have to defer to their 
greater knowledge of m17n

>   4. Poor development enviroments compared to .NET/Java - however this
> is slowly getting better - f.x. RDT is quite useful.

Different people want different things in a development environment.  I'm 
happy with X & vi.  Others really like TextMate on OSX.  There are even a 
few preverts that use emacs  :-)

> This is not a flame-invitation, but I would be interested in hearing
> constructive feedback from more experienced Ruby developers to address
> wrongs/shortcommings in my analysis.

Ok, there's my feedback.  I think the current version of Ruby is very good 
and the next version will be even better.

-- Matt
Nothing great was ever accomplished without _passion_