ruby as slow scripting language vs java?

[boud]

hi samizdat-devel,

i realise that this list is aimed at developing samizdat, which has
been written in ruby, and that is probably a fundamental part of the
package.

However, someone has just pointed out a concern to me:

ruby is a scripting language, not a compiled language, and hence
runs much slower than a language like java. According to this analysis:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=ruby&sort=fullcpu

java runs many codes anywhere from 50 to 200 times faster than ruby,
though it also uses typically up to 5 times as much memory.

Would there be any sense to think of preparing a java version (but
designed to run on the free versions of jvm's/jre's, not the sun
versions) ?

Personally, i don't have any experience programming in either of these
languages. (i've started in C, in the past i wrote in fortran.)

i have to admit that except for servers with tight memory constraints,
this is a rather discouraging argument against samizdat :(.  Please
correct me if i'm wrong...

Could it be that none of these tests are for the sort of operations
which are slowest for a CMS, e.g. string operations? e.g. sum-file
seems to be a program which operates and strings, and it is only about
10 times slower in ruby than java, according to the table.


boud