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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

is ruby really that slow? The things has been trying to reverse my name for the last 5 min. And it is fake four letter name i gave it. I shudder to think what would happen if it were my real name.

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Do you genuinely think Ruby is that slow? The server probably got overloaded because this was on HN and dropped your connection. Ruby running on my phone can reverse a four-character string in a fraction of a second.

I'm pretty sure this was a joke harkening back to the days of _why, when Ruby actually was fairly slow compared to other interpreted languages of the day.

It's just latency to the server + the server not being designed for concurrent traffic. Ruby is inherently slower than many interpreted languages, but its combination of power and readability sets it apart, IMHO.

λ time ruby -e0

real 0m0.004s user 0m0.002s sys 0m0.001s

Your shell prompt is a lambda? I wasn't aware that was possible with most terminal emulators.

zsh on OSX can do it.

Not only there, but zsh in urxvt on Arch Linux is able to do it too - I guess it's a general feature of zsh, then?

I don't think it has to do with the shell. It should only depend on whether your terminal emulator can handle unicode. I'm using Bash on OSX in this screenshot, but it was easy to switch: http://cl.ly/Ab4B

Sorry for the slowness. We were having issues with traffic earlier that didn't have much to do with Ruby, but it should be MUCH faster now. Let us know if you run into any other issues.

I assure you, ruby is not actually that slow. It's also a dynamic interpreter...not like running your own ruby (which would be waayyyy faster)

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