Hello,

I will try to answer your questions. But it is only from my
point-of-view. If you will get different answers from matz, gotoken or
other, better forget my ones ;-)))

Dat Nguyen writes:

...

> I am interested in creating a Ruby success story here. Considering
> the fact that the principal product of the company is power control
> system.
> Q1: Is Ruby up to the task?  (That is, can you use Ruby to do
> everything you do with C/C++ in term of speed, performance, thread,
> etc. for a huge critical application?)

Huge? No problem, but what do you mean with critical? I would not use
Ruby for life-critical applications like control of nuclear reactors
or the like. But I also would not use Python, Perl, Tcl or even C++
there!!!

For all other You cannot get a simple answer like 'yes' or 'no' here!
It depends. Some facts are:

   - You can do all you could do with C/C++. Most of the time even 
     better than in C/C++.
   - Raw speed and performance of a pure Ruby app *will* be slower 
     than the corresponding one implemented in C/C++.
   - Threads are more relieable and faster then using e.g. pthreads 
     with C/C++ (at least, IMHO, pthreads under Linux and Solaris)

The most critical issue is about speed and performance! If you write
all of your stuff in C/C++, you will be faster than the same coded in
pure Ruby! But there is a big *BUT*. Because, if you develope your app
in Ruby *and* time-critical parts in C as so-called Ruby extension,
you will much faster come to a result and it is not impossible that
the overall performance is faster or equal to the app coded entirely
in C/C++!

Sounds silly? :-)

> Q2: Is the current GUI for Ruby usable?

What do you mean here? I can use the Tk extension! But I would
probably use the GTK one, as it promises to be faster.

> Q3: Does Ruby have the popular interfaces to RDBMS (Oracle,
> Informix, etc.)?

It has for Oracle (I already used it). I do not know for other ones.

...

> Dat

...

HTH,
\cle