

Ruby is slow? She's fast enough for you. - MrMcDowall
http://www.mcdowall.info/john/blog/2011/07/ruby-is-slow-shes-fast-enough-for-you/

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prodigal_erik
V8 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
That's the point I'm making - MRI is slow.

~~~
prodigal_erik
From 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
I've not seen any substantial or conclusive figures on this yet - if you know
of any I'd welcome seeing them.

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afsina
No 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.

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wccrawford
I love it when people try to tell me that a language is good enough for my
needs without knowing what my needs are.

~~~
MrMcDowall
Try reading the post.

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peteforde
I'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
Or 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
No, 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.

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WordSkill
No speed for you!

~~~
MrMcDowall
Speed kills!

