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Comment by compay | Hacker News Reader

Rubinius has a different performance profile from MRI. It's considerably faster at some things and slower at others.

That would take even longer for serious production to switch to Rubinius. Especially when people have invested a lot in terms of learning how to boost MRI performance to the last drop.

Yes, it would not be a painless change. But neither has the switch from 1.8 to 1.9 been pain-free. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

Most of the large apps in production I'm aware of have just stuck with 1.8. It's stable and fast.

For most of my apps it's "fast enough" too. But I definitely wouldn't call it "fast."

Fair enough. But I meant "fast" relative to Ruby 1.9.2, not "fast" relative to anything else. The "require" issue aside, REE beats out 1.9.2 pretty handily in a lot of real world situations. I've seen 1.9.2 win in microbenchmarks, but I haven't actually seen it perform better on a real app yet. Obvious selection bias there, but the point really being there's no compelling reason to upgrade.

Yes. Unfortunately, the balance seems heavily weighted toward the slow end of the curve, so that in practice it comes out slower than MRI.

It's not just for things like Rails apps that Ruby is typically used for, either. I frequently process data, such as large log files, and now and then I try out the different Ruby to see if things have gotten better. So far, 1.9 and JRuby are the winners.

(LuaJIT is typically 2-5 times faster than both, so these days I tend to write my scripts in Lua.)

Yeah, I agree. Lua is actually my favorite language ahead of Ruby. I have F3 mapped in Vim to run my tests; one of my projects is an implementation of Haml in Lua, and even that runs all of its tests in a small fraction of a second. The more you work with Lua the harder it can be to go back to Ruby sometimes.

I like Lua, but it does lack Ruby's elegance and expressiveness. Its best trait may be that it's simple, and therefore performant.

On my list of gripes: Lua's attempt at OO, being implemented as hash tables, is even more pitiful than JavaScript's. Also, arrays are implemented as hashes (just like PHP!), which is just one notch below JavaScript again. I also wish for a more expressive regex syntax, but then that's the text processing talking.

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