Slashdot Mirror
Ruby Implementation Shootout
An anonymous reader writes "Ruby has an ever growing number of alternative implementations, and many of these attempt to improve the suboptimal performance of the current mainstream interpreter. Antonio Cangiano has an interesting article in which he benchmarks a few of the most popular Ruby implementations, including Yarv (the heart of Ruby 2.0), JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius and Cardinal (Ruby on Parrot). Numerical evidence is provided rather than shear opinions. The tests show that Yarv is the fastest implementation and that it offers a promising future when it comes to the speed of the next Ruby version."
I was on the same boat until a couple of weeks ago ... anyway, Ruby is The Hottest Thing Since Sliced Bread (TM). It's a programming language that was created in Japan all the way back in 1995. However, it has only just recently garnered mainstream interest due to the emergence of a web application framework built on Ruby, which is called Ruby on Rails and is said to be an incredibly well-thought and efficient framework.
More on Ruby here.
And more on Ruby on Rails here.
I personally have an enormous interest in Ruby on Rails, as it seems to be a very neat way of writing web applications, but I'm also a bit daunted; it's a new language and a whole new framework with different ways of doing things, so it's been slow going learning it. I just wish I knew where to get some extensive sample code to peruse - that's how I learn best. All I've seen are some very basic applications which don't really teach you the real tricks and show how it all comes together.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Ruby is a dynamically typed, strongly typed, runtime-interpretted, very object-oriented programming language. It was created about the same time as Python (10+ years ago?), but is less well-known in the United States as it originated in Japan. It is the langauge that the Ruby on Rails web framework is based on. See the official Ruby website for more information.
Yes, Ruby is the current web development flavor of the month, however, don't get caught up in the hype. There are good number of MVC web development frameworks in other languages, including even Lisp and Smalltalk, but most notably Python. In my opinion it makes more sense to learn a Python framework for a number of reasons. Mainly because Python is used in considerably more non-web applications than Ruby, which makes your skills more portable (and you more employable). Ruby on Rails is also very monolythic, while two of the the three most popular Python frameworks, TurboGears and Pylons are very modular (especially Pylons since it's built around the WSGI spec). Finally, Python compiles to bytecode whereas Ruby does not. Hence Python outperforms Ruby in almost every shootout.
Further reading:
Of snakes and rubies; Or why I chose Python over Ruby
TurboGears and Pylons (a technical comparison)
From PHP to Python (my blog)
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"