[mileszs]

For what it's worth, I help to organize a fairly active Ruby group, and I am certain that, if not zero, nearly zero of us would make this proclamation. In fact -- and I mean not to attack you, but just to illustrate how incredulous I am -- I tried to think of a reason there might be for you to fabricate or exaggerate that story. I don't really think you did, but my mind went there.

[kenjackson]

Didn't make it up. No reason to do so, although I suspect if I spent some time on HN I could find some posts about Ruby perf that don't jive with reality.

But I will say this, do you think this guy made up his post about using Ruby to try to write this game? If you don't think it fabricated, do you think he's alone?

I do think there is a fundamental problem, especially with respect to perf, that a lot of people have never looked at what code actually runs on their box. Never looked at the emitted or generated asm. Don't know the cost of calling a method, much less invoking some framework routine to do something. And then you couple this with a lot of devs think their the cats meow because they got x trans/sec and hear horror stories about the ceremony and inefficiency of C++.

And it doesn't help with the blogs and articles that constantly come out saying that Java or Ruby or Lisp is faster than C/C++ (the answer is never pleasingly straightfroward).

While I appreciate that none in your Ruby group would think this, I'd also ask why do they believe this? It's no more reassuring if they don't have a clear understanding of why C++ might be better for the job.

Lastly, I should add that the conversation was a heated discussion where I was playing devil's advocate that I thought they were going to switch off of Ruby like Twitter. I don't think they really appreciated it, although I wasn't actually being all that serious at the time.

[mileszs]

> But I will say this, do you think this guy made up his post about using Ruby to try to write this game? If you don't think it fabricated, do you think he's alone?

I neither think his story is fabricated, nor do I think he's alone. (I didn't say I really thought your story was fabricated, either.)

> While I appreciate that none in your Ruby group would think this, I'd also ask why do they believe this?

I don't know that we would all choose C++, were we building a game, but the performance of Ruby is frequently a topic of discussion. We are lucky enough to have several members that have significant experience working with/around Ruby performance, and they share their knowledge. In other words, were you to choose one of us at random, we would more likely be able to tell you why Ruby is not a good idea, as opposed to why C++ is.

[igouy]

> And it doesn't help with the blogs and articles that constantly come out saying that Java or Ruby or Lisp is faster than C/C++

Show them some numbers

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...