At 8:09 AM +0900 7/21/02, Dan Sugalski wrote:
>Speed, mainly. Going from an interpreted to a compiled form gives a 
>number of opportunities to remove overhead. Walking optrees has some 
>expense involved--depending on how complex the operation is, how 
>much optimization you do, and the CPU architecture, you can see a 
>speedup somewhere between 1.1 and 40 times going compiled.

Compiling Ruby to C is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. 
Compiling Ruby to bytecodes (ala Parrot) makes a lot more sense to me.

Or for that matter, compile it to Smalltalk, Squeak (or even Java??). 
That way you get Peter Deutch's work on on-the-fly bytecode 
optimization, which will bring you about as close as you can get to 
C's speed in a non-stack-based language.
-- 
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