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All that beautiful meta-programming flexibility has come at a price. The research projects sponsored by the likes of IBM and Oracle to give Ruby a much needed s

All that beautiful meta-programming flexibility has come at a price. The research projects sponsored by the likes of IBM and Oracle to give Ruby a much needed speed boost are very slow in the offing – it feels like V8 was developed overnight in comparison. Aesthetically I think Ruby beats Python/Javascript/Perl but unfortunately that's not enough to move the needle on the dial. It'll be interesting to see whether Python or Ruby or Ruby get to WebAssembly first – I'm correct in saying that none has of yet, yes?

goatlover 9y ago
Common Lisp found a way to be performant. Is Ruby really that much harder to optimize than other dynamic languages? JS had the advantage that there was strong incentive to make it fast in the browser, and V8 had Lars Bak working on it.
- igravious 9y ago
  Apologies to everyone for turning this into a Ruby thing on a Python topic. You can check out the Oracle Labs code and progress of Graal/TruffleRuby here: https://github.com/graalvm/truffleruby https://github.com/graalvm/truffleruby Relevant page: https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=labs:49:::::P49_PROJECT_ID:130 https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=labs:49:::::P49_PROJECT... And IBM's Ruby+OMR code and progress is here: https://github.com/rubyomr-preview/ruby https://github.com/rubyomr-preview/ruby Relevant post: https://developer.ibm.com/open/2017/03/01/ruby-omr-jit-compiler-whats-next/ https://developer.ibm.com/open/2017/03/01/ruby-omr-jit-compi... Can Matz somehow in the nicest possible way kidnap Lars Bak and pay him in gummy bears or something?
flavio81 9y ago
> All that beautiful meta-programming flexibility has come at a price Scheme, Common Lisp, and Julia all have good metaprogramming facilities (i'd argue, for Scheme & CL, way beyond what Ruby offers), and they are highly performant, indeed much faster than Ruby, Python (even under Jython) and Javascript under V8.
cutler 9y ago
Ruby needs Matz's 3x3 yesterday as it's haemorrhaging mindshare all over the place. Node is eating its lunch in web development, Golang is encroaching on the niche held by Chef and Puppet and Elixir offers the missing concurrency. Consequently Ruby is slipping, little by little, in the job statistics. There are just too many alternatives for it to grow unless Truffle Ruby or Substrate VM come up with something soon.

goatlover 9y ago

Common Lisp found a way to be performant. Is Ruby really that much harder to optimize than other dynamic languages? JS had the advantage that there was strong incentive to make it fast in the browser, and V8 had Lars Bak working on it.

igravious 9y ago
Apologies to everyone for turning this into a Ruby thing on a Python topic. You can check out the Oracle Labs code and progress of Graal/TruffleRuby here: https://github.com/graalvm/truffleruby https://github.com/graalvm/truffleruby Relevant page: https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=labs:49:::::P49_PROJECT_ID:130 https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=labs:49:::::P49_PROJECT... And IBM's Ruby+OMR code and progress is here: https://github.com/rubyomr-preview/ruby https://github.com/rubyomr-preview/ruby Relevant post: https://developer.ibm.com/open/2017/03/01/ruby-omr-jit-compiler-whats-next/ https://developer.ibm.com/open/2017/03/01/ruby-omr-jit-compi... Can Matz somehow in the nicest possible way kidnap Lars Bak and pay him in gummy bears or something?

flavio81 9y ago

> All that beautiful meta-programming flexibility has come at a price Scheme, Common Lisp, and Julia all have good metaprogramming facilities (i'd argue, for Scheme & CL, way beyond what Ruby offers), and they are highly performant, indeed much faster than Ruby, Python (even under Jython) and Javascript under V8.

cutler 9y ago

Ruby needs Matz's 3x3 yesterday as it's haemorrhaging mindshare all over the place. Node is eating its lunch in web development, Golang is encroaching on the niche held by Chef and Puppet and Elixir offers the missing concurrency. Consequently Ruby is slipping, little by little, in the job statistics. There are just too many alternatives for it to grow unless Truffle Ruby or Substrate VM come up with something soon.