On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 12:43:18AM +0900, Volkmann, Mark wrote:
> I took a quick look at many of the performance tests at
> http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/. You're right, Ruby is not 30 times
> slower than Perl, but it seems to take about twice as long as Perl in most
> of the tests. Some aren't quite that bad, but many are much worse than twice
> as long. Python appears to be much closer to the performance of Perl than
> Ruby.

Ruby is also faster than Perl on at least one of the tests.  If you go
to the scorecard page and enter a multiplier of 1 for cpu, memory, and
lines of code, then Ruby and Perl are neck and neck.  It would be
interesting to see how Ruby 1.7 stacks up.

As interesting as this is, I don't think that for real-world
applications, any of it is relevant.  Most Ruby and Perl programmers
will rewrite a portion of code as a C extension when it is not fast
enough.  Given this approach, Ruby and Perl will probably perform
similarly for most applications.

Paul