On Monday 07 November 2005 2:07 pm, mortench wrote:

>    1. Slow and very primitve VM - no jit, vm comparable to java 10
> years ago.

Speed is only relevant when you need it.  I've been writing Ruby code for my 
living since April 2002.  I have many, many web sites and web based business 
applications that I have done in that time running for many customers, and 
the only times I have ever had a performance related issue was either because 
I was simply being stupid with my algorithm or because of a bottleneck 
outside of Ruby.  I can conceive of tasks where I might want to optimize 
parts of it, and for those parts, if I need it, I will either write an 
extension of use RubyInline to tweak just those sections.

And YARV, when it is released, will likely eliminate almost any inclination 
that I have to optimize through extensions or RubyInline.

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

This isn't that big of a deal.  In-process threads have some advantages, and 
most problems that could make use of threads can just as easily make use of 
separate processes.

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

Not a big issue.  I can write web apps that use a variety of different 
encodings, and that converts between them with Iconv.  Ruby doesn't care.  
It's all just strings of data,  I would think that given the large number of 
Japanese users of the language, if this were really much of a problem, it 
would have been addressed long before now.

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

Also absolutely a non-issue.  I kind of like Eclipse + RDT, but it is hardly 
because of the rich Java-like goodness that Eclipse brings to my coding.  And 
while I have never seen a Ruby project that was so expansive that something 
as simple as vim couldn't be used effectively, there are other options.  Lots 
of other options, and many of them are overkill for almost everything.  
Eclipse certainly is.  I like kdevelop quite a bit.  It gives me almost 
everything that I like form Eclipse without being such a resource pig.  But 
it's also overkill for many, many coding tasks.  I just don't understand this 
eagerness for a super-ide for Ruby, I guess, because I have never found a 
need that wasn't already met.  I added it up a couple weeks ago, and I have 
close to a quarter million lines of code in production, and I have never seen 
the need for a .net/java style IDE.


Kirk Haines



Kirk Haines