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Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

Ruby is inherently much too slow to have ever been a Swift. All of its dynamic runtime features give it a pretty low performance ceiling compared to a statically typed, compiled language with very limited runtime introspection/reflection.

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I think it is important the parents was referring to MacRuby [1], which is a very different Ruby Implementation than current CRuby.

And yes, MacRuby ( not Ruby ) could very much been Swift.

[1] http://macruby.org

Common Lisp, Dylan kind of prove otherwise. Also RubyMotion isn't that slow either from what I can tell.

It is all a matter of how much money one wants to throw at the problem.

Also ironically, some of the high performance libraries in macOS/iOS are still being written in Objective-C, despite the goal to replace them with Swift.

RubyMotion is awesome but it should be noted that RubyMotion apps are statically compiled for each native platform. Also note that it has been rebranded to DragonRuby:

http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/03/01/the-sleeping-drago...

While it's still very slow, modern Javascript VMs are fast enough for many usages. Ruby is slow, but it could be a lot faster with a lot of time and money.

V8 is a work of art <3

What do you like the most in the V8 internals?

It's not nice to pick a favourite child. Though something I heard about recently that made me happy (less about V8 internals) is how they try not to improve compilation speed by not compiling. There isn't a video about it yet but you can stalk https://2020.programming-conference.org/details/MoreVMs-2020... when it exists

But developing in JS is consideray slower than in Ruby, and time to market should be king.

> time to market should be king

Eh, not really.

On a mobile device, efficiency should be king... that's not exactly Ruby's forte

I'm skeptical of your first point as well

How does backend development reflect on mobile?

"Ruby could have been Swift"

Swift's raison d'etre is mobile development

JavaScript VMs are quite fast, actually. They get a lot of attention.

BS. Ruby isn't slow. The same apps can be written in pretty much any language nowadays.

The problem is in developers. They are slow and dumb and lazy and most often also biased. Blaming language is easy. Bad developer will always write spaghetti no matter which language he uses.

It’s both. Ruby IS slow. If you ever need to create a tree structure that isn’t available in a natively-compiled Gem, you’ll know what I mean.

This is only true if your applications are mostly high level glue.

Which is what most "business" apps are anyway.

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