Chuck Remes wrote:
> On Feb 23, 2010, at 7:50 AM, Jrg W Mittag wrote:
>> Alexander Jesner wrote:
>>> On 02/22/2010 20:30, Benedikt Mller wrote:
>>>> Ruby is not the fastest interpreted language out there.
>>> If you have not already done so, switch to Ruby 1.9.
>> I have seen this claim that Ruby 1.9 is somehow faster than Ruby 1.8
>> repeated over and over again, but I have *never* seen any credible
>> evidence for that, neither in my own benchmarks nor in Antonio
>> Cangiano's (or any other, for that matter). Does anyone have any
>> evidence that this is actually the case? I would be very interested in
>> that.
> Are you looking at the same benchmarks and charts that I am?
> 
> http://antoniocangiano.com/category/ruby-benchmark-suite/

Yes, I am.

> This clearly shows that 1.9.1 is consistently and measurably faster
> than 1.8 in nearly every benchmark.

No, it doesn't. It shows that 1.9.1 running on one VM is faster than
1.8 on a *totally different* VM. That's shoddy benchmarking. If you
want to benchmark 1.8 vs. 1.9, you benchmark 1.8 vs. 1.9 and not 1.8
and some other things vs. 1.9 and some totally unrelated, completely
different other things.

This is statistics 101, and is usually called "controlling your
variables", although the great Zed Shaw in his inimitable style said
it much better: "if you want to measure shit, don't measure other
shit."

You claim that the performance increase is due to Ruby 1.9. But how do
you know that? How do you know it is not due to YARV? Or different
compiler options? Or different ./configure options? After all, it
wouldn't be the first time that Antonio had to withdraw or correct his
benchmark results.

> My own experience proves this out too.

Then show your results! As I wrote before: I would love to see them!

jwm