Re: [PATCH/RFC 0/7] Support for Ruby

From: Patrick Donnelly <batrick@batbytes.com>
Date: Sep 23, 2013, 18:20 UTC
Message-ID: <CACh33FpP_Afb-9eke8m282saUZEDA_ZVbUQvKc6R3EF3P1ZvTA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAMP44s3OYjv2LsU+6FY_qESdCvJcD4zb46aJmKpruof3hYEGzQ@mail.gmail.com>

Hello Felipe,

On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 4:29 AM, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 3:12 AM, Fredrik Gustafsson <iveqy@iveqy.com> wrote:
>> And see my humble test of what the speedup would be for git-submodule
>> even with a faulty lua integration (still forking... but huge
>> performance boost anyway):
>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/228031/focus=228051
>
> I don't see how that is relevant, but I'm certain the same can be done
> with Ruby.
>
>> As you can see a lua integration would increase the git binary with
>> 300kb.
>
> And my patch would increase it 49Kb.

Unless you statically compile in Ruby (which is what the above quoted 300kb implied for Lua, in actually it is less than 200kb). [Also good luck statically compiling Python/Ruby into an executable.]

> IMO the problem with lua is that it's too simple, it's syntax doesn't
> resemble c, perl, python, shell, or ruby, it's just weird. Also, it's
> much less popular, it's not as powerful, and there isn't a big
> community involved with Git like with Ruby.

*sigh*. At this point you've really cemented your purpose here as a language evangelist. It's unfortunate I have to reply to dismiss this FUD (which you complained about earlier, ironically) otherwise community accepts it as fact ("oh, I remember some guys saying Lua was a language for idiots...").

Lua is by no means *simple*. Try "small" or "lightweight". Its syntax is engineered to be readable and amateur friendly. You've placed Ruby on a pedestal alongside those other major languages but its syntax doesn't resemble any of those.

>Also, it's much less popular

https://sites.google.com/site/marbux/home/where-lua-is-used

The hallmark of a good embedded language is your users don't even know it is there.

>  it's not as powerful,

This is really funny to me. Despite Lua's small size, it has lead the way for modern dynamic language features, such as coroutines, block level scoping and real closure, incremental GC, a simple and usable C API (*yes* this is a feature), and a register based VM [1]. It is consistently placed as the *fastest* dynamic language in existence [e.g. 2]? The LuaJIT compiler often achieves competitive or better performance than C [3]. What about this isn't powerful?

[1] Ierusalimschy, Roberto, Luiz Henrique De Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes Filho. "The Implementation of Lua 5.0." J. UCS 11.7 (2005): 1159-1176. [2] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=lua&lang2=yarv&data=u32 [3] http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html

-- 
Patrick Donnelly