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Comment by buugs | Hacker News Reader

I don't think performance is holding ruby back I think that libraries especially mature and massive libraries, or lack thereof, is holding ruby back. Not to say people aren't working on it give ruby some time it will probably catch up especially with rails but just not right away.

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Performance has always been a finger in Ruby's eye, but with 1.9 that doesn't seem the case.

Regarding libraries; you are right. Ruby has a lot of code out there, but much of it is in random repositories maintained by random people. Hopefully this changes.

Though it must be said, rubygems is miles ahead of anything available for python.

Can you explain more? Is there better native packaging (deb/rpm) etc support?

Rubygems is a separate system from deb/rpm, but works roughly the same way. Typically it doesn't do binary packaging the way they do it, though, and if native (non-ruby) code is required it is compiled during the install.

I'm not convinced that's true, as the depth and quality of rubygems are inferior to the depth and quality of eggs available in python. Find me e.g. a "gem install scipy" equivalent for Ruby.

However - "easy_uninstall scipy" REALLY needs to work!

My point precisely. I was referring to the package management system being better, not necessarily the packages available.

I believe the parent was referring to the rubygems system, not the quality of the gems themselves.

" think that libraries especially mature and massive libraries, or lack thereof, is holding ruby back."

JRuby FTW.

Yes, there are downsides to sitting on the JVM, but for anything other than one-off scripts, or where start-up speed is really important, JRuby gives the best of both worlds[0]: Ruby syntax with JVM libraries.

[0] Clearly if you do not care for Ruby syntax then this is not a win. I believe, though, that JRuby is more advanced and stable than Jython. But the Jython folks are quite capable for continuing to kick ass, so that will improve.

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