Is Ruby Too Slow?
September 14, 2006
Joel thinks so; David Heinemeier Hansson has a great pragmatic answer; Smalltalk guru Avi Bryant explains why dynamic, duck-typed languages don’t have to be slow at all, both he and Patrick Logan point out the link to Hotspot’s Smalltalk predecessor, StrongTalk; Steve Vinoski (who certainly has done his share of C++ development) criticizes Joel’s “fundamental misunderstanding”; Obie is disappointed by Joel.
I still think Joel is one of the greatest writers on the ‘net, but in this case, I agree he’s plainly wrong.
About
This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on September 14, 2006 10:09 AM. The previous post in this blog was Tim Bray and Ruby. The next post in this blog is RailsConf Europe. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
Comments
So Joel is plainly wrong when he says that Ruby is slow? Have you seen http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/?
Posted by: Jan Persson at September 14, 2006 5:41 PM | link
Ruby is obviously a lot slower than many other languages. That’s not the point. The major point is whether that maters.
The shootout doesn’t prove anything, IMO, since a Web app — the target of Rails — spends most of its time waiting on either the network or the DB. I’ve not yet seen a Ruby on Rails app that failed because of performance issues, and I don’t really expect to see one anytime soon.
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at September 15, 2006 12:31 AM | link
Please read this: http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/12.html
Joel is talking specifically about Ruby, not Rails. Ruby IS slow, fullstop. This may be secondary in webapps, but is still a matter of fact. This also means that Java is the best thing could happen to Ruby: rumors says that the JRuby implementation will be faster than the original c implementation.
Posted by: raffaele at March 5, 2007 12:42 PM | link