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>Great comment.

Thank you very much.

>Do you have any thoughts why it's so hard for Ruby people to create an efficient implementation of Ruby?

The most concise way I can put it, and frankly this is just a rephrasing of Nutter's original linked post but:

Ruby forces you to carry a lot of dynamic buckets of state and context around and make them accessible and mutable in unpredictable, hard to optimize ways.

Ruby isn't that much more expressive so as to justify its slowness, that was part of the point of my top-level comment. The slowness comes from the ease of use of the expressive power and how "accessible" it is.

Common Lisp is much more powerful, especially at "scale", but it's less accessible and trivial and forces you to be more structured and precise in how you pass around state and access data. Despite that, it still enabled powerful ways of manage conditions/exceptions, continuations, predicate dispatch, etc.

Nutter is really the guy to talk to on the nitty-gritty. I'm just speaking from a differential semantic viewpoint of how it compares to a much faster and more powerful programming language.




Aside from the huge benefit it gets by being single-threaded, doesn't javascript have a lot of this same baggage? V8 is so much faster than Ruby for certain algorithms that I would think there still has to be lots of room for optimization if someone poured the money and IQ into it that Google did.




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