Ruby is slow? - some experience

[vgarcia]

Well then I guess there is hope of speed improvements then.

I'm not really bashing ruby...I've never used it personally. I'm in the process of setting up a site with ruby as a trial run and I'll begin development as soon as I find some good tutorials on rails (seems hard to find good resources on the framework).

Pick up the "Agile Web Development with Rails" book from the Pragmatic Programmers. That's been the best source of information for me (and you can find it on Amazon for under $25), along with the Ruby on Rails API for when I get stuck on how to use something in the framework.

[Luke Redpath]

But every forum I've been too seems to have at some complaints about the speed so I assumed it was a huge problem. I'll hold off further judgement until I've tested it out myself and see if its fast enough for my needs.

I believe this would be a good idea.

Posting about real-world speed problems like the OP is one thing, but the consistent bashing of Ruby from people who don't even use it and form opinions based on "things they've read" is somewhat annoying.

I echo Vinnie's recommendation on the Agile Rails book. Not only is it a great resource on Rails, but also has some good bits and pieces on agile development such as unit testing, functional testing etc.

I also recommend the Programming Ruby book, from Pragmatic Programmers.

[joflow]

I'll check those books out. I really hope sitepoint has a rails book on the way.

[vgarcia]

I'll check those books out. I really hope sitepoint has a rails book on the way.

It's not currently in the works but if there's demand I'm sure they'll pull through

[lastcraft]

Hi...

It wasn't, and wasn't suggested that you were getting "bothered" by the speed either.

I wasn't worried and did not think it an attack at all. I was just summing up the state of play for my current situation. The concern is touching though .

yours, Marcus

[bonefry]

And it's slow...

Well, after reading this thread, I'm kind of glad I followed my gut instinct to learn Python. The option of learn Ruby has always been there of course, but for some reason (gut instinct maybe) I've never felt at ease about Ruby.
...
It's ironic to read someone say that there is hope, in the context of being compared to something like Python. I've always had the vision that Python was the better language of the two anyways, but reading this just goes and confirms it.

Ruby doesn't rock people. It never has, and I'm sorry if this comes across as being negative, but I'm being honest if nothing else.

I was the one comparing it to Python, and when I did that comparison I was thinking like improvements in the near future.

I also learned Python ... well, the basics anyway. And to be honest, it's a dead end. It's design has too many hacks, and with all due respect to the pythonic way ... it's evolving slowly into "Perl 7 without closures".

I like Ruby as a language. And Rails, although it may not be used for real applications after all, it surely gave a clear picture of what a framework should feel like, and the fact that clones are attempted in every modern languages should tell something about it.

That's why I will still use Ruby. And don't dismiss jRuby

[Dr Livingston]

I wasn't intending my post to be dismissive as such, but my thoughts I gathered from reading this thread on Ruby it's self.

I wouldn't either suggest that Python's design is hack ladden, it's not from what I can tell of it - at the moment, the basics, but I'm still learning it so maybe I'm not the one to be judgemental - it looks clean, well thought out, etc. One thing I don't like though is the need of indention, and I do miss those braces

What interests me though, does anyone know of any real world applications (non web) developed using Ruby, either open source or otherwise? If there is something concrete, maybe my mood towards Ruby will lighten up huh

The intentions of Python for me, is the threading and GUI toolkits.

Java Swing is too time consuming to develop with in my view, so maybe Python is a better language to develop with instead; less constraints as in for example, it's environment.

PHP can handle the web evenly enough. That's all you need really.

[vgarcia]

PHP can handle the web evenly enough. That's all you need really.

If it's true that "PHP is enough", then why the proliferation of PHP-based frameworks? And why the massive interest for languages other than PHP for web development?

[Sgarissta]

I wasn't intending my post to be dismissive as such, but my thoughts I gathered from reading this thread on Ruby it's self.

I wouldn't either suggest that Python's design is hack ladden, it's not from what I can tell of it - at the moment, the basics, but I'm still learning it so maybe I'm not the one to be judgemental - it looks clean, well thought out, etc. One thing I don't like though is the need of indention, and I do miss those braces

What interests me though, does anyone know of any real world applications (non web) developed using Ruby, either open source or otherwise? If there is something concrete, maybe my mood towards Ruby will lighten up huh

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby I figure if NASA and NOAA can use it, it'll handle my little shell scripts.

The intentions of Python for me, is the threading and GUI toolkits.

Ruby does not have native threads, which can be an advantage, and a hinderence all at once. One place that it definitely lacks is GUI toolkits, it has bindings to all the major ones, but they are all still heavily under development.

Java Swing is too time consuming to develop with in my view, so maybe Python is a better language to develop with instead; less constraints as in for example, it's environment.

PHP can handle the web evenly enough. That's all you need really.

JAVA can handle the web evenly enough. Perl handled the web evenly enough before PHP. C handled the web evenly enough before Perl. There is always something new, and we should always be striving to improve the ways that we work. I'm not saying that Ruby is the next big improvement, but just that dismissing it because something else already exists is rather silly.

[bonefry]

Java Swing is too time consuming to develop with in my view, so maybe Python is a better language to develop with instead; less constraints as in for example, it's environment.

Swing is a framework, Python is a language In Python you have bindings to GTK, QT, wxWidgets, and others. I worked with Swing and it's not that hard. I even found that is very easy to build custom components. Maybe you can say the reasons why you didn't liked it.

Also, Ruby doesn't have native threads, only emulated threads inside the VM. Python does have native threads, but only one at a time can run, so even if you have multiple processors, Python won't be able to use them.
Also, I think they both can fork processes, but that surelly isn't available under Windows.
If you want true multithreading capabilities, the best by far is Java. It even performs better that .NET in this area.
But I don't believe you will need true multithreading for 95% of your apps.

[ghurtado]

PHP can handle the web evenly enough. That's all you need really.

Don't tell me what I need.

[datune]

@Dr Livingston

Seriously, you made me grin a few times and wonder a lot. Do you even know what you are talking about? Your comments are (mostly) so full of "bla bla bla", unbelievable! (no offence but come on ).

@rest

Personally I think it's awesome that things like RoR are around for US developers to use for FREE at our disposal. I can't believe people bashing on something as harsh as i've read on these forums.

It's one thing to (try to) conduct a serious benchmark (as Marcus tried) and wanting to discuss the results of it in a civilized matter, but most arguments given here make me wonder. (i'm sorry you guys, but that's just how it is)
Example:

PHP can handle the web evenly enough. That's all you need really.

What kind of statement is that? Are you even for real?

I can not think of a single valid reason why I would want to be unhappy about the existance of Ruby (RoR).

Does that mean I am going to drop everything just to learn Ruby? Of course not! But you better bet I have it installed and for sure going to play around with it. (as time allows).

Just my $0.02

Ps: Some of you must have just as much deja-vu's as me. Anybody who remembers the PHP vs .NET / vs Java (i'm not kidding, people seriously compared PHP with Java...go figure...) similar bashing threads and articles...

[bonefry]

Ps: Some of you must have just as much deja-vu's as me. Anybody who remembers the PHP vs .NET / vs Java (i'm not kidding, people seriously compared PHP with Java...go figure...) similar bashing threads and articles...

yeap, that's a mistake I think.

In general it is "My car is better that your car, because it is all I need and I don't even have to know about yours".

And on the other side it is "My car is new and smarter and you are an old-timer that doesn't accept change".

Although I love Ruby allready, it is a language borned for generating flames. How can Ruby not be bashed when the Rails creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, is marketing Rails by bashing Java. Here's his latest blog on the subject:
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000517.html

He's a very smart fellow, but his arguments against Java are quite ... out of place. And he's a leader in the Ruby world that bashes Java. And all the buzz it created around Ruby and Rails is good, but Java programmers that will try Ruby are definitelly going to be dissapointed if they tried Ruby on Rails with the hope it is a substitute for Java ... as David sugests every chance it gets.

So you can fully expect this kind of behaviour because big flames come out of the Rails community because David encourages it (although comp.lang.ruby is quite a friendly place).

[datune]

In general it is "My car is better that your car, because it is all I need and I don't even have to know about yours".

And on the other side it is "My car is new and smarter and you are an old-timer that doesn't accept change".

Excellent way to summarize! I agree 100%

How can Ruby not be bashed when the Rails creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, is marketing Rails by bashing Java. Here's his latest blog on the subject:
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000517.html

I read the post and I think my definition of bashing is different of yours. All I see in that blog is one or more person's oppinions written in a civilized and adult manner. And to be honest, I agree with what is being said in that blog. Also, see what he says at the end of the article:

In summary: Java and J2EE isn't going any where — neither should they.

Obviously he is most interested to generate as much buzz as possible, but I'm not sure if immature arguments are what he is looking for...

[tropicRanger]

Actually based on the way Ruby's IO works, you can just do something as simple as

File.open (stuff here) { |f|
   f << YourDataArray.join('\n')
}

Try using the << operator for concatenation, it doesn't create new string objects during the addition, and is typically much faster.

Yes. Ruby is typically a slower than PHP and Perl for heavy text processing, just do to the object overhead but once you've adjusted to "The Ruby Way" you'll find one-off processing scripts are much faster to write in Ruby, and only marginally slower.

IMHO, user experience should be a top development goal. Lose the user, lose the business. I don't understand how faster development is a benefit over user experience. Release in stages if needed, but for the love of God, man, don't sacrifice usability! Fads come and go, but the bottom line is, the platform that processes the fastest should undoubtedly win the battle, whether it be PHP, Ruby, C#, Java, or for that matter, COBOL! Memory overhead and processing time...find the language that handles this the best, and you've got a winner. Now, I am not sure which that is, but I favor PHP for scripting, C++ or C# for the desktop. Of course, I am not looking to start a syntax battle, but a cpu cycles battle.

[KTottE]

It's all variable.

If you are developing an application which isn't going to handle heaps of data and calculations, faster development time (I.E shorter time before the end user receives his product) is a massive bonus when using Ruby. I've done several of these small apps, I hammer them out in a day or two and the response I get from my colleagues is on the lines of "Well done mate, really nice that you got it working so quick".

If I had been doing them in PHP, it would have taken me at least three or four days longer per application. Also, I don't know if PHP has an equivalent of the rubyscript2exe module, does it? If it doesn't - then it's not even an option.

So, my point is that while runtime performance is absolutely vital for the end user expeirence - sometimes you can sacrifice some of those clock cycles in order to deliver to the user sooner rather than later.

Making generalisations that: 1) Development time is more important or 2) Runtime performance is more important is just plain old silly.

[sweatje]

the platform that processes the fastest should undoubtedly win the battle, whether it be PHP, Ruby, C#, Java, or for that matter, COBOL! Memory overhead and processing time...find the language that handles this the best, and you've got a winner. Now, I am not sure which that is, but I favor PHP for scripting, C++ or C# for the desktop. Of course, I am not looking to start a syntax battle, but a cpu cycles battle.

Why is it that I have not seen any web template engines in assembly?

[bonefry]

Why is it that I have not seen any web template engines in assembly?

I tried to do one but I couldn't find any decent regexp API

[DougBTX]

Since its been around for 10 years...does this mean that development has been slow?

Well, it seems to be faster than people here can follow, 1.8.3 was released in the middle of last month.

From reading the mailing lists, the influence of Rails on the development of Ruby itself seems minimal. There does seem to be more effor being put into the public face of Ruby though, for example the work on the new ruby-lang.org site, and more people taking a look at making better default RDoc templates.

Douglas

[Fenrir2]

I've never heard of a programmer who has used Ruby saying it is crap.

I wanted to learn python to make a website-generator to build my website. I liked the language very much. But for every problem there is a solution built into the python language. That makes it hard to learn and not elegant. In Ruby there are only a few things: Objects, messages and code-blocks. I saw Ruby was much easier to learn and to use. So I learned Ruby. I was very happy with it, and i rewrote the website-build-script from PHP to Ruby, and the code was much shorter, and easier to read, and executes fast enough. Ruby may be slow, but it is fast enough for 99% of all scripts. And why is Ruby slow? Because of the language? No, because of the interpreter. And for Ruby 2.0 there will be Rite, maybe 5-10 times faster? Then Ruby will be comparable or faster than PHP/Python.
Ruby is older than PHP, but in the US and Europe it is much newer. This makes development slow because only a few japanese people are working on Ruby/libraries. Now there are a lot of people from the US and Europe too.

Please do me a favor: include the number of lines of Ruby-code you've written (LORC < 1000 or LORC > 1000) in your post so everyone will be able to see whether you're serious or not.

LORC > 1000

[bonefry]

Well, I wouldn't say 99% of all scripts That's just hype promoted on LoudThinking.com and on comp.lang.ruby.

I consider any platform that can't handle a O(n^2) alghoritm as slow. Just for fun, do a script that finds the first prime number with N digits (where N is given) and then test it for 4 and 5 digits.

Of course Ruby is suitable if the logic is mainly in the DB, and you only need to fetch results and show tables. But these apps don't make for 99% of all scripts. Just look at FreeRide and then tell me Ruby is suitable for it.

If what you say it's true, and Rite will deliver that performance then GREAT. But until then don't expect pointy haired bosses to jump on board just because Ruby (the language) is beautifull.

LORC > 1000

[KTottE]

People need to get realistic.

My workstation at work is relatively slow (on par with or slower than the target machines), and I'm always measuring the runtime performance when I develop on it. If it is too slow on my machine it will be too slow for the target machine.

So, quite often (say.. 60-70% of the time) I find myself going with C/C++ instead of Ruby, due to Rubys lack of runtime performance. Whenever I am forced to write C++ however, I tend to prototype the application in Ruby before I put it into "real" code.

Since Ruby has fewer hoops to jump through it makes it suitable for a prototype language, in my opinion. But, the ruby-fanboys need to wake up and smell their burning CPU - Ruby is not suitable for many tasks because it lacks runtime performance. It will probably change with 2.0, but that is not released yet.

LORC > 1000...

[Fenrir2]

Take a look at: http://www.mondrian-ide.com/ -- This one's pretty good.

But keep in mind that you should use Ruby only for things Ruby is good at. Website generation, for example. With Rake it's very easy to take a bunch of HTML-files, parse them with REXML, and then create a navigation menu and a sitemap and put everything in a layout. This saves you a CMS.

And Ruby is pretty good for simple GUI applications too. Just not for graphics manipulation, data compression, or other expensive tasks, and it never will.

[ezmobius1]

Guys here is some concrete information about YARV the next ruby VM.

http://www.atdot.net/~ko1/tmp/OOPSLA05_poster.pdf
(warning large format pdf of a poster)

That is the pdf of the presentation that the author of YARV will be delivering next week at RubyConf. There are some graphs showing what the actual speed up of yarv compared to the current ruby vm. Also Matz has said that he hopes to have yarv merged with ruby HEAD before the end of the year(we'll see if this is true). I have a sandbox with ruby 1.9.x and yarv as the interpreter and I can tell you it is _much_ faster. When it is finished Ruby will definitely be as fast if not faster than any other current scripting language.

For now though I use ruby for a largish website and a ton of text processing at the newspaper I work for. It is plenty fast fro these tasks. Network latency will slow you down more than ruby on website development and will let you write cleaner code to boot.

Oh.. lets not forget LORC > 7000

[jaikoo]

Eeek. It really saddens me when I see smart people argue about subjects like this. There was a time when I used to think real men wrote web apps in Java. I mean its fast, its well supported and its got a great library.

But around 2 years ago I noticed that my release cycles for my team were getting longer and longer. It wasn't a problem of feature bloat in the applications, but an increase in the complexity of the frameworks we were using.
Thats when I started searching for an alternative that could support shorter release cycles. Then around a year ago I discovered RoR and the rest is history. Once you're familiar with RoR web development is blindingly fast.

However good software engineers don't pick one language, proclaim it the "golden hammer" and go about solving every problem there is with it. I mean there are some people who *do* do that, but its a road to lost sleep.

Ruby can be very fast and I find most problems are attributed to people not doing things in the "Ruby Way" and also the lack of deeper knowledge of their new found language. But lets be honest, you should pick a language based on your problem domain. I still use Perl to do text processing and when it comes to GUI apps I write them in Python. If I had a problem that required good threading and couldn't be solved more easily with a more novel solution then Ruby currently wouldn't be my choice to implement the solution.
This doesn't mean that Ruby sucks and is worthless. Pick the right tool for the job and be happy