Ruby Fibonacci Shootout

Based on this article, I would totally consider moving to Ruby for my Fibonacci number needs.

I don't think this "CPU Intensive" task is the kind of CPU-intensive task you actually care about. I haven't done any formal experimentation, but I'm guessing this is a better test of how many instructions are generated for a call/ret sequence, and not how well normal CPU-intensive operations would work. I would think some code that did a fair amount of number crunching/lookups in a tight loop would be a much better test.

But, then again, it doesn't really matter. Is Ruby fast enough to work for most uses? Yes. If you really, really, really care about execution speed, would you use Ruby? I don't know. If you care that much about execution speed, you will probably do more benchmarks than I care to think of.

I kept staring at this page, and yet despite its brevity, I could not find the results.

Apparently Firefox doesn't like the self-closing script tag?

Ported this to scala (I know, I didn't do this functionally, this is a pretty straight port of the C example), ran in 4 seconds (of course, I've got about a bajillion other apps open right now, so take this with a grain of salt):

     object Main {
        def fib(n : int) : int = {
            if(n < 2) n
            else
                fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
        }

        def main(args: Array[String]) = {
            for (i <- 0 until 37) {
                printf("n = " + i.toString + " => "+fib(i).toString)
            }
        }
     }

Is it really a shootout if he misses most of the Ruby implementations?

Recursive/iterative Fibonacci number generation is an interesting programming exercise but it's a bad example because in practice you'd be best to use an explicit constant-time formula.

Huh? Where's the results? Or are readers supposed to run the code and send their results or something? But there's no timing check in the code he posted anyway.