On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 10:32 AM, Marnen Laibow-Koser <marnen / marnen.org> wrote:
> But my point was a bit different. Python and Ruby are basically similar
> languages, and what annoys me is that there seems not to have been the
> will in the Ruby community to steal some speed tricks from Python. (I'd
> be working on this if I knew anything practical about language
> implementation, but I don't.)

Unfortunately, the Python community seems to turn to "write it in C" a
lot more often than the Ruby community has, so the #1 performance
trick for Python is to not write in Python. That's obviously the wrong
direction for us to go...I don't think anyone here would prefer to
write C over Ruby (or Java, or C++, or C#) when Ruby is the right tool
for the job...

And I'll also mention the truth of performance we've discovered
repeatedly in JRuby: if you don't have fast core classes, you don't
have a fast Ruby implementation. 99% of the performance problems we've
investigated over the years could be traced back to core class
implementations, which in most implementations are already written in
a "fast" language like C or Java (Rubinius has a mix of C++ and Ruby
for most core classes, with emphasis on Ruby). So a large number of
poor-performing systems in Ruby can be directly attributed to misuse
or slow implementation of core methods. And that's a much harder and
extensive challenge to meet.

- Charlie