conker said:
Hi All,
It's sad to see ruby at the bottom of this list:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all
Any thoughts on this?
I find no value to this list. First, I remember when the same kinds of
people tried to say that Native C++ code ran faster than Delphi, but
every test showed Delphi faster. I even remember when I was doing dBASE
for windows, that there was an arrSort() (array sort) method that
crashed when you opened too many items through it. One of the Borland
engineers wrote a sorting algorithm which not only ran without crashing
but was 150+ times faster than the native C++ code used. DBASE is an
interpreted language also.
Just having an interpreted language is not enough to say that it will be
slow. This site does not say just what the test is or how it is coded
for each language. There are ways to code that will change the speed of
execution dramatically.
There was another thread about running something that requires 10 msec
time slicing that ruby was able to do reliably.
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/106209#new This shows that things can
be run fairly fast. One poster said that windows has a 15 msec time
slice. For Ruby to work at 10 msecs is fast.
Also, the bottom line is not how many times you can run
1000000.times
p (123.456 / 987.654).to_s
in a second.
If it is fast enough, and it usually is, then there are other
considerations that are far more important. Can you get it running
reliably in the time allotted? It is easily maintained? Is it
extensible and otherwise easily modified and updated? There is more to
the value of a language than running a single floating point calculation
a bazillion times. As long as it works fast enough to keep users from
getting annoyed, it is fast enough.
To put things like that in a chart is for people that do not think
further than just the pretty pictures at what lies behind. The people
that support and want Ruby have far more to consider and want far more
from their programming language than that.
Fwiw & imho