I have to agree with Nutter - MacRuby is nowhere near a complete implementation and there is absolutely no point trying to judge its performance until it is. See last year's MagLev debacle for precedent. You were right on board with that train wreck, if I recall correctly, and let me assure you the few of us who poured skepticism on their numbers are feeling pretty vindicated by now.
Another problem I have is the use of these artificial benchmarks to judge speed at all. Time and time again experience has shown that benchmark performance has little relevance in the real world. For example, your most recent Ruby 1.9 benchmarks post:
shows Ruby 1.9 coming out 250% faster than 1.8. 250%! This is an absolutely meaningless figure. I have recently posted my own benchmarks of actual production 1.8.6 and 1.9.1 installations running an actual real world program (Rails) serving an actual production web site and the performance gain is closer to 15%:
I will not pretend that my quick and dirty testing is any kind of canonical "last word" result but on the other hand, I also can say with absolute certainty that no sizable app is going to experience anywhere near a 250% speed increase from Ruby 1.9. These benchmarks are worse than nothing, they're completely misleading. I am all for getting everyone onto 1.9 but geeze!
And of course you can't even run a "real world" app on MacRuby at all, because it's too immature, which kind of completes the circle of pointlessness. It is way too early for this kind of thing.
I do sympathise with your mission of promoting knowledge of and getting people excited about the future of the various Ruby implementations but can you please tone back the hype a bit?
Another problem I have is the use of these artificial benchmarks to judge speed at all. Time and time again experience has shown that benchmark performance has little relevance in the real world. For example, your most recent Ruby 1.9 benchmarks post:
http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/10/reflections-on-the-rub...
shows Ruby 1.9 coming out 250% faster than 1.8. 250%! This is an absolutely meaningless figure. I have recently posted my own benchmarks of actual production 1.8.6 and 1.9.1 installations running an actual real world program (Rails) serving an actual production web site and the performance gain is closer to 15%:
http://fukamachi.org/wp/2009/03/27/thin-ruby-191-vs-ruby-186...
I will not pretend that my quick and dirty testing is any kind of canonical "last word" result but on the other hand, I also can say with absolute certainty that no sizable app is going to experience anywhere near a 250% speed increase from Ruby 1.9. These benchmarks are worse than nothing, they're completely misleading. I am all for getting everyone onto 1.9 but geeze!
And of course you can't even run a "real world" app on MacRuby at all, because it's too immature, which kind of completes the circle of pointlessness. It is way too early for this kind of thing.
I do sympathise with your mission of promoting knowledge of and getting people excited about the future of the various Ruby implementations but can you please tone back the hype a bit?