> My current thinking is that a language as elegant as Ruby with the
> execution speed of C is so hard to make that there's no point in
> expending the effort.
>
> Combining languages seems like a more practical idea to me. Write your
> code in Ruby, but if you find bottlenecks in your code, write those bits
> in C.

While its unreasonable to think that Ruby could perform comparable to C, I
think its definitely worth the effort to increase Ruby performance up to
some practical limit. We all benefit from a faster Ruby.

Each notch up the performance scale means that less code needs to be written
in C and more can be written in Ruby. This is a good thing. As Ruby
performance improves, it becomes usable in more application areas and by
more people (like those who don't know C). This, also, is a good thing.

Regards,
Curt