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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."
Of course, the results don't exactly show a "3x speedup"... they show between a 0.08x speedup and a 7.8x speedup, with a high variability. Which is really great for such an early build, but it's not an instant panacea for everything.
E pluribus unum
I agree with this totally. These days I'm writing exclusively in Ruby and it is "fast enough" (even with 1.8.X). In fact, this speed issue is such a big red herring for me. I hardly ever have any issues with speed. Instead I spend most of my optimization time trying to cut down on memory usage.
For me, even an order of magnitude difference in speed (i.e., 10X) isn't going to mean too much. There are certainly places where I'd like my code to be faster, but they are very, very small places. I can easily code them in C if I have to (C/Ruby bindings are *very* easy to write). But honestly, I've never gotten to the point where a speed improvement is more important than a functionality improvement. Every program is different, of course. So not every problem is suited to Ruby.