"Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla" <dido / imperium.ph> wrote in message news:<20020807033226.GB1745 / imperium.ph>...

> I don't think dynamic typing is the problem.  We've had an Objective-C
> compiler in GCC for about ten years or so, and the fact that Objective-C
> is even more rabidly dynamic than Ruby hasn't stopped the folks at NeXT
> and the GCC developers from producing a native-code compiler for it.
> True, it makes the compiler more complicated and slower, but that didn't
> hold them back.

Dynamic typing is the one and only problems !
It seems that you never did serious Objective-C programming otherwise
you would now that this is C with objects and most of the important
data structure algorithms are done with the static c types.

You will never get a compiler so efficient as Ocaml or Eiffel in
dynamic languages - both are able to do full system analysis. So they
don't need any checks about virtual methods.