Small announcement: Ruby R0XXORS.

[elfs]

Ruby is officially cool. Even without Rails, I can totally see how this language could become addictive fast. I barely speak the language and am desperately thumbing through the nutshell book at warp speed and I manage to write a better, faster, and more secure version of Narrator, this one obeying the principle of "configuration, not integration!", in less than half an hour.

That's totally cool. The only question remaining is simple: does the lack of an interim on-disk format cause a performance hit compared to the python version?

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

This app? Not yet.

However, at work we had a large python program for statistics gathering. One of the requirements was that any one statistic should run in 0.20 seconds or less. The fastest ran in 1.10. After one of co-workers tweaked and twisted, he managed to get it down to 0.89. I said to him, "It's a big python script. Try breaking all of the different operations out into modules, pre-compiling them, and loading them on demand."

He didn't think that would make any difference, but rendering the python process tree turned out to be the bulk of the development time: it knocked the runtime down to 0.11 seconds.

So, yeah, sometimes that is really important.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. Having the bytecode precompiled definitely makes a difference. I was just questioning whether this app needs to be optimized anyways.