Ruby is slow? She's fast enough for you. | Hacker News Reader

Ruby is slow? She's fast enough for you.

mcdowall.info

6 pointsMrMcDowall12 comments

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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

Try reading the post.

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.

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.

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.

No speed for you!

Speed kills!

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