

Response to "Maglev and the naiivety of the Rails community" from Patrick Collison - icey
http://collison.ie/blog/2008/06/maglev-and-language-implementation

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aston
This sure has a lot of upmods for zero comments. Nothing against pc, but is
this really that spectacular of a blog post? It's like the 10th MagLev
response on the front page lately, and doesn't add too much to the discussion
other than a quick comparison to Common LISP.

~~~
huhtenberg
The hype build-up continues. Note how a friend of MagLev devs points out that
it's "up to 60x", which technically could mean _anything_ including "60x for
one specific case and 1x for the rest of them". With claims that are this
wishy-washy, the only sensible option is to wait for the benchmarks of the
public release. Anything else merely fuels the hype machine.

(edit) Hmm, interesting .. getting down-modded. I guess independent
benchmarking is no longer a preferred way of confirming rather bold vendor
claims.

~~~
stcredzero
You should be skeptical of vendor benchmarks. But being ignorant of how far VM
technologies have come and how far Ruby has left to go is not excusable. (Or
more importantly, not being self-aware enough to figure out what you don't
know, then having the bad luck to get posted on social news.)

In any case, most of the time it matters more to programmer's egos now than
anything else. CPython is already fast enough for low-level bitwise operations
on large amounts of data, provided you are clever with optimizing and you're
willing to implement key routines in C. Just look at Mercurial! It's in the
same league as Git for speed, and Git is written entirely in C by one of the
best C hackers around.

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papersmith
I find the transparent persistence and caching much more interesting. I wonder
if you can transparently persist closures and continuations. If so you can do
some really neat things.

~~~
avibryant
I find it much more interesting as well. And yes, you can - I showed
persisting a closure at the demo, and Gemstone persists continuations as a
matter of course in their Seaside port.

~~~
papersmith
That's awesome. I'll definitely give it a try then.

------
davidw
I'm just not interested in closed source low-level infrastructure (like
programming languages) if I can possibly help it. Look at how much trouble
that caused with Java... no thanks.

~~~
stcredzero
The situation with Java is very different. The language itself is not owned by
a corporation. There is no need for a "clean room reimplementation," as was
necessary for Java.

Also, Avi's trick with Gemstone/S can also be replicated with any other
commercial Smalltalk. It can also be replicated with the now Open Source
Strongtalk VM, which is a Smalltalk VM as fast as the the commercial ones.

And when YARV is ready to put under apps like Rails the Ruby community will
have another VM as fast as the commercial Smalltalk JITs.

