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Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

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Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#21

Post by WJW »

shevy-java wrote: post #12
faangguyindia wrote: post #7

People think Ruby is a slow language, but little do they know Ruby is a slower language than Go. But ruby these days is faster than Python.

The speed argument never convinced me in general, in that whether it is perl, ruby or python, they are all slower than C. So the comparisons really are odd to me. The "scripting" languages should of course not try to be slow, but people rarely use them for speed-reasons; they use these languages for gains in productivity and ease of writing code, adding features and so forth. That should be the primary focus point. I…

There's also "slow compared to C" and "slow enough that you notice when using it as an interactive shell". Running something like `Dir.each_child('.') {|x| p x}` in the interpreter completes in 1.3 milliseconds, which includes all the separate print calls. It could be much faster if we compute the string to print first and then only issue a single print call, but this is deliberately inefficient to show it doesn't matter in this usecase.

I wouldn't use Ruby for high performance computing. But for scripting (where runtime is not critical), web services (where transport latency will usually far outstrip the few milliseconds your handler takes) or shell use (where humans aren't fast enough to issue a new command every millisecond anyway), Ruby is more than fast enough.

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#22

Post by rco8786 »

dahrkael wrote: post #8
faangguyindia wrote: post #7

People think Ruby is a slow language, but little do they know Ruby is a slower language than Go. But ruby these days is faster than Python.

when ruby was trendy the 1.9 branch was still cooking so in a lot of people's mind it is veery slow

Yea. Modern Ruby is "fast enough", but it's very real that when Ruby was hitting its peak it was dog slow. It's hard to shake those sorts of reputations (similar to the "can't scale" reputation that Rails got because of Twitter)

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#23

Post by librasteve »

shevy-java wrote: post #12
faangguyindia wrote: post #7

People think Ruby is a slow language, but little do they know Ruby is a slower language than Go. But ruby these days is faster than Python.

The speed argument never convinced me in general, in that whether it is perl, ruby or python, they are all slower than C. So the comparisons really are odd to me. The "scripting" languages should of course not try to be slow, but people rarely use them for speed-reasons; they use these languages for gains in productivity and ease of writing code, adding features and so forth. That should be the primary focus point. I…

I would “up” this a little and say that scripting languages “should” be slow in comparison to low level compiled languages. We want eg. runtime evaluation of multis dependent on type. For (cod) example:

  subset Even of Int where *  %% 2;
  subset Odd  of Int where * !%% 2;

  multi foo(Even $i) { ‘fizz’ }
  multi foo(Odd  $i) { ‘buzz’ }

  say foo for ^9;

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#24

Post by Alifatisk »

faangguyindia wrote: post #7

People think Ruby is a slow language, but little do they know Ruby is a slower language than Go. But ruby these days is faster than Python.

But who cares really? I am not using Ruby for HPC. I use it for prototyping, oneliners for ETL and to glue different moving parts in a system or network together. That's it. Its not doing the heavy lifting anyways.

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#25

Post by adamtulinius »

shevy-java wrote: post #16
ilvez wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ls | grep file.txt vs ls().grep("file.txt")

Your comparison is not quite optimised as you use () which is not necessary. But I understand the comparison you make. But, you can write an optimised pipe in ruby too. I actually did that, because I could not want to be bothered to be restricted via ruby's syntax for pipe-like operations. Even aside from that, the original claim was about pipes versus method chaining. To me these are not orthogonal to one another; t…

The docs literally says that the () on the first ls is required.

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#27

Post by cassianoleal »

shevy-java wrote: post #11

Hmm. The name is a bit awkward since people can call it "rubbish". The idea is also not quite new in that many years ago people worked on an ruby-like shell with OOP support from the get go and they used a ncurses drop down box too. I forgot the name, but it must have been before 2010 already, as I vaguely remember it from talking on IRC back in those days. I think the main developer was from South Africa, but I don'…

> Rails is also ancient already.

I think Rails both boosted Ruby and killed it. When I ask people about why they dislike Ruby it's usually due to something specific to Rails (plus some comments around syntax which are easily dismissed or accepted).

I used to be a pretty heavy Ruby user and I still love the language, though I have only used Rails sparsely and not by choice.

I had the opportunity to work on a Ruby project for a couple weeks a few years ago and it was such a pleasure to read through the code and interpret it! It was unfortunately another project that was being replaced with something else because Ruby skills were harder to find.

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#28

Post by Crestwave »

faangguyindia wrote: post #7

People think Ruby is a slow language, but little do they know Ruby is a slower language than Go. But ruby these days is faster than Python.

> little do they know Ruby is a slower language than Go

Isn't it generally expected for a feature-packed interpreted language to be slower than a minimal compiled language?

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#30

Post by thunderbong »

Alifatisk wrote: post #26

I have to confess, seeing Claude as a contributor made me sigh, but I still skimmed through and it looked quite thorough and well thought out. So, I don't know if this sits on the thin line between a vibe coded project and an LLM assisted project.

Any software tool requires intelligence to be used well, including AI.
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