Experimental MacRuby Branch Is 3x Faster
An anonymous reader writes "Zen and the Art of Programming published an article about MacRuby's new experimental 0.5 branch (project blog entry here). According to the included benchmarks, Apple's version of Ruby could already, at this early stage of its development, be about three times as fast as the fastest Ruby implementation available elsewhere."
Every time a story is posted about Ruby performance improvements, someone will post something along the lines of "x times faster than super ultra duper slow is still slow". Even if Ruby is 1000 times faster, there will still be people complaining. My guess is that none of these people actually use Ruby in production to be able to tell how much interpreter performance actually matters in the grand scheme of things.
Well, if you ask me, I suspect that someday in a future version of the Mac OS, Ruby will be a first-class language for application development alongside or perhaps replacing Objective-C. I think Apple likes Ruby and its aesthetic. A lot of the Rails devs are Mac developers, and I think that's where it sparked.
First Class, maybe. Replacing ObjC? You're prediction makes LSD trips seem dull.