"g forever" <g24ever / hotmail.com> writes:

> When Ruby moves to production applications performance is a big
> factor in choosing the language. People are willing to put up with
> some inelegance.
> 
> Is there anyone working on performance. It would be a shame for Ruby to 
> wither because other languages execute faster?

But by that logic, C wouldn't have replaced assembler. Java wouldn't
have been popular. Nor would Perl.

Performance is important. But increasingly, time to develop, ease of
maintenance, and other more global factors trump performance.

Added to which, in many real-life applications (such as those
connected to databases) the performance of the application is largely
out of your hands. Performing an SQL statement that updates 1,000,000
rows takes the same time in a Ruby program as it does in a C program.

I agree we need to be working on performance. But I think we have
other big issues too: distribution of applications, a good library
system, bytecode generation, and the like that are equally, if not
more important.


Regards


Dave