On 9/23/07, Ruby Maniac <raychorn / hotmail.com> wrote:
> I welcome any corrections anyone might be able to make since I am new
> to Ruby with less than 3 months experience under my belt.
>
I'm not going to address any of your Rails comments, because they have
nothing to do with Ruby. Rails is just a library.

Python is not faster than Ruby due to language design, but because
skilled people got together and made it faster. Nothing is stopping
people from doing the same for Ruby.

Some corrections:
1. YARV is 'out', in the form of Ruby 1.9. A stable release is coming
in a matter of months.

2. JIT is nice, but it is not a panacea. C and C++ are plenty fast,
and use AOT compilation, not JIT. Java has shown that a combination of
AOT and JIT can  yield impressive performance, but Psyco is merely one
approach out of many.

3. YARV has some (unfinished) competition with significantly varying approaches:
* JRuby: The trunk version offers compilation as well as
interpretation. At some point it will almost certainly support fancy
JIT tricks, given its architecture.  http://jruby.codehaus.org/
* Rubinius: Currently supports 'only' AOT compilation to bytecode.
When it is done, we will be doing much more sophisticated things, a la
Pepsi/Coke/J3.  http://rubini.us/
* IronRuby: I don't know enough about their architecture to say, but
they will probably bring some impressive performance to the table as
well.

Please don't judge Ruby the language by looking at the current 1.8
implementation. They are not the same thing, and the limitations of
1.8 are not necessarily invariant constraints.

On the other hand, I'm probably wasting my time with this reply.
Calling Ruby a "cute" language means you are almost certainly a troll.
Please forgive me if I am wrong about this.