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Now I wasn't at the conference either, but you have to admit that this whole thing smells like pure hype. As they say, "if it sounds too good to be true, it pro

Now I wasn't at the conference either, but you have to admit that this whole thing smells like pure hype. As they say, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is".

raganwald 18y ago
Well, it _is_ pure hype until such time as they ship. That being said, it doesn't sound too good to be true, it sounds like they are trying to drag Ruby up to the state-of-the-art for dynamic language performance circa 1990 or so. =My equally uninformed windbaggish douchebaggery guess is that there will be some serious compromises to be made if you want 10x-50+x performance. For example, what if you need a pragma to turn eval and method_missing off for a section of code to obtain the highest performance? In that case, it won't run every Ruby program at hyper speed, but I bet a lot of people will ask themselves if they need those two difficult-to-optimize features for 100% of their code, or whether they can turn them off here or there or even forgo them entirely. I guess what I am trying to say is that it probably isn't as good as it sounds in some respects but it may still have plenty of room to be a game-changer.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  You don't need to turn off the equivalents of eval and method_missing to get full performance in Smalltalk. Not using them might be advisable in performance critical code in either language, however. Also, the commercial Smalltalk JIT VMs are generally quite a bit ahead of the 1990's in terms of performance. Don't be also guilty of using "common sense."
icey 18y ago
Maybe it's just his tone that rubbed the wrong way. The entire article reminded me of some superbowl commercial where everyone's posteriors were dispensing advice. He basically has a thousand words about MagLev being bullshit, but he has no credentials or proof to back it up. I guess I just trust Avi Bryant's opinion over some random blogger's.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  Not only that, but he's revealing his ignorance of how the VMs in question differ. The 1.8 Matz VM traverses a partial Abstract Syntax Tree to interpret. The Gemstone VM is JIT-ing. On top of that, it has better GC. Oh, this is really rich: "However, it seems to me that Smalltalk is far less flexible than Ruby, while being semantically much more machine-friendly." (From the comments.) From my comments: "Oh, and “Smalltalk is less flexible than Ruby?” Uh, no. Any serious language maven will tell you that they are almost identical in many respects, but that Smalltalk wins because you can not only modify the entire library, you can refactor base classes completely out of existence, and you can arbitrarily change the grammar. (And there’s even more!) This is precisely why it’s relatively easy to put Ruby on top of the Smalltalk VM. If you can bootstrap a Ruby parser into a Smalltalk image, the Smalltalk image can incrementally morph itself into Ruby. (And another goal of the Rubinius project is to give Ruby the same level of meta-capabilities already present in Smalltalk!)" PWNED! EDIT: Okay, Sho has changed his tone in his latest comments. I think he just blogged off the cuff and didn't realize how widely read his blog post might be. He even says he's going to check out Smalltalk.

Now I wasn't at the conference either, but you have to admit that this whole thing smells like pure hype. As they say, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is".

raganwald 18y ago

Well, it _is_ pure hype until such time as they ship. That being said, it doesn't sound too good to be true, it sounds like they are trying to drag Ruby up to the state-of-the-art for dynamic language performance circa 1990 or so. =My equally uninformed windbaggish douchebaggery guess is that there will be some serious compromises to be made if you want 10x-50+x performance. For example, what if you need a pragma to turn eval and method_missing off for a section of code to obtain the highest performance? In that case, it won't run every Ruby program at hyper speed, but I bet a lot of people will ask themselves if they need those two difficult-to-optimize features for 100% of their code, or whether they can turn them off here or there or even forgo them entirely. I guess what I am trying to say is that it probably isn't as good as it sounds in some respects but it may still have plenty of room to be a game-changer.

stcredzero 18y ago
You don't need to turn off the equivalents of eval and method_missing to get full performance in Smalltalk. Not using them might be advisable in performance critical code in either language, however. Also, the commercial Smalltalk JIT VMs are generally quite a bit ahead of the 1990's in terms of performance. Don't be also guilty of using "common sense."

icey 18y ago

Maybe it's just his tone that rubbed the wrong way. The entire article reminded me of some superbowl commercial where everyone's posteriors were dispensing advice. He basically has a thousand words about MagLev being bullshit, but he has no credentials or proof to back it up. I guess I just trust Avi Bryant's opinion over some random blogger's.

stcredzero 18y ago
Not only that, but he's revealing his ignorance of how the VMs in question differ. The 1.8 Matz VM traverses a partial Abstract Syntax Tree to interpret. The Gemstone VM is JIT-ing. On top of that, it has better GC. Oh, this is really rich: "However, it seems to me that Smalltalk is far less flexible than Ruby, while being semantically much more machine-friendly." (From the comments.) From my comments: "Oh, and “Smalltalk is less flexible than Ruby?” Uh, no. Any serious language maven will tell you that they are almost identical in many respects, but that Smalltalk wins because you can not only modify the entire library, you can refactor base classes completely out of existence, and you can arbitrarily change the grammar. (And there’s even more!) This is precisely why it’s relatively easy to put Ruby on top of the Smalltalk VM. If you can bootstrap a Ruby parser into a Smalltalk image, the Smalltalk image can incrementally morph itself into Ruby. (And another goal of the Rubinius project is to give Ruby the same level of meta-capabilities already present in Smalltalk!)" PWNED! EDIT: Okay, Sho has changed his tone in his latest comments. I think he just blogged off the cuff and didn't realize how widely read his blog post might be. He even says he's going to check out Smalltalk.