
Maglev and the naiivety of the Rails community - fiaz
http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/06/02/maglev-and-the-naiivety-of-the-rails-community/
======
sah
This is nonsense. Ruby's MRI interpreter can be beaten by an unusually wide
margin because it is unusually slow for an interpreter of a language like
Ruby. Go look at the benchmarks on <http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/> \-- on
many benchmarks, fast implementations of similar dynamic languages like
Python, Scheme, and (tellingly) Smalltalk beat Ruby's MRI by ~10x.

~~~
fiaz
Is there a section that benchmarks interpreters within the same language
against one another?

I think the point of this article was to see how realistic the promises of
MagLev are compared to the fruits of labor of other teams building
specifically Ruby interpreters for the last couple of years.

~~~
rbanffy
The question whether it is possible to make Ruby faster is very close to how
fast can we make other similar languages. If we can make a system run
Smalltalk much faster than the same system can run the best Ruby
implementation, we know something in the Ruby implementation is very wrong.

Every language in this league solves very similar problems. It's the
techniques people use to solve them that make the difference in performance.

While not as good as directly comparing different Ruby implementations, the
results of comparing similar languages lend some credibility to the Maglev
claims.

------
icey
So, I've read this a couple of times now, and I honestly can't see this as
being anything other than someone being intentionally contrarian.

As far as I can tell, this guy was not at the presentation, and is basing his
opinions on snippets that he's read elsewhere on the net. Additionally, as far
as I can tell, this guy hasn't produced anything of merit to the programming
community.

I'm not a rails apologist, and have never actually done anything in Ruby, but
to me this guy comes off as a gas bag who thinks he knows better than everyone
else; all based on hearsay.

~~~
m0nty
"and is basing his opinions on snippets that he's read elsewhere on the net"

It's worse than that. Much, much worse. He's basing his opinions on "common
sense".

~~~
icey
I think Charles Oliver Nutter did an excellent job parsing Maglev's numbers:

<http://headius.blogspot.com/2008/06/maglev.html>

------
raganwald
As mentioned elsewhere: Naïvité. It's a terrific loan-word, it has a diaeresis
and an accent :-)

<http://tinyurl.com/2hep8v>

------
chollida1
> Why do people say things like this.

It makes it hard to take the author seriously. Actually it makes him sound
like he's 10 years old.

