5 ms·
Ruby is slow? She's fast enough for you.
- wccrawford 15y agoI love it when people try to tell me that a language is good enough for my needs without knowing what my needs are.
- MrMcDowall 15y agoTry reading the post.
- afsina 15y agoNo sir, Ruby is dead slow for my needs. For the things we work on, it can be used for some scripts here and there but that's it.
- WordSkill 15y agoNo speed for you!
- MrMcDowall 15y agoSpeed kills!
- prodigal_erik 15y agoV8 convinced me it's not quite impossible to optimize such a highly dynamic language. JRuby on JVM 1.7 could be decent once everyone has a lot of experience with invokedynamic. But most have found MRI is nearly as slow as Zend (PHP), and we picked up 6x performance by migrating our critical stuff from there to Java (we have enough machines to easily make that worthwhile). I've already found Ruby nice for stuff we're confident we don't have a reason to scale, though.
- MrMcDowall 15y agoThat's the point I'm making - MRI is slow.
- prodigal_erik 15y agoFrom what I gather, JRuby on pre-invokedynamic JVMs isn't substantially faster than MRI 1.9. Parallelism brings more cores to bear, but then they're all bogged down in expensive dispatch (to pay for the ability to change behavior for any message at any moment).
- MrMcDowall 15y agoI've not seen any substantial or conclusive figures on this yet - if you know of any I'd welcome seeing them.
- peteforde 15y agoI'm really disappointed to see how many HN readers skim the first few lines of an article like this, and then comment as the informed reader.
- wccrawford 15y agoOr maybe they aren't. Despite his reply to me, I -did- read the whole thing. It doesn't change the fact that the statement that Ruby will meet my needs is not always right. I have yet to find the language that can be put into that statement and always end up correct, no matter the situation. We get his point. Not all Ruby is created equal. But that doesn't mean that one of them will meet our needs.
- MrMcDowall 15y agoNo, you're still missing the point, but probably because the article wasn't clear. It's written from the perspective of a software startup who needs to get a concept out fast, and then iterate. If you're in a field where you do high volume trading, real-time data transmission or whatever then of course you should use something faster. I still assert that for the beginning startup, or anyone looking to build out an idea, they don't need to worry about whether Ruby is fast enough.