[programminggeek]

I will say that Java, Scala, or any compiled JVM language will run code a lot faster than Ruby. So will Go, so will C#, so will C++. Ruby isn't about fast, it's about expressiveness and programmer happiness.

If you wanted fast, you'd use a compiled language. If you want fast and ruby syntax, you might use Mirah, which is great btw.

In either case, I don't think that twitter made a mistake at all. Everything I've read says that 1 java server =~ 10 ruby servers and twitter isn't the only one who has said this. So, if you are talking about going from 10,000 machines to 1,000 machines that's saving 9,000 x $1,000 or about $900,000. At that scale machine cost does matter.

Most developers will never work at that scale so it is hard to understand that set of requirements, but at a certain point it's less about how fast you can write CRUD ops or other forms over data type things and more about making sure everything runs as fast and reliably as possible.

[berntb]

>>Everything I've read says that 1 java server =~ 10 ruby servers

I believe that is roughly correct. I'd add two points:

- This goes about the same for all the scripting languages and the faster compiled languages. (+)

- You should consider, and might even earn time, by first doing a scripting language implementation and then port it to C/C++/Java/etc, instead of going to C/C++/etc directly.

(But all this is more or less conventional wisdom, afaik.)

(+) Some lisp variants might be able to be as expressive as a scripting language while almost as fast as a compiled language. I don't really know that world since quite a few years.