I'll add my voice to the chorus.

On Mon,  7 Nov 2005 at 13:02 -0800, 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.

Fast enough for most things, plenty fast when you move the inner loops
into a C extension. (What's that they say about 90% of the time in 10%
of the code or something?)

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

Yes, and I am also glad that this is being worked on. Some have said
this is a non-issue, and that's hogwash. The current thread
implementation would be good enough I think if it just didn't block the
whole process when doing a read, for example.

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

Others have commented on this far better than I could. This thread is
the first time I've heard the details of the plan for 2.0 and it sounds
perfect. (an encoding 'tag')

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

Sorry, but I don't buy the IDE arguments. Some people prefer them, and
that's fine. But a _lot_ of _really_good_ code has been written in vi
and emacs, by really smart and pragmatic developers. In my own
experience, I can code circles in vim around the VisualStudio users.

So 2 out of 4, and those 2 are already being worked on. Not a bad report
card.