[GD-General] Ruby opinions

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

The fun continues as I try to bring up interesting topics without allowing 
the threads to devolve into flame fests =)

So after much deliberation of Obj-C and Eiffel, someone on Yet Another 
Mailing List (cocoa-dev) said "Hey, why not use Ruby?!"  I've always 
considered Ruby more of a scripting language than a "real" development 
language, based on the overviews I've seen of it.  For writing a high 
performance server project, I think the orders of magnitude difference in 
performance between your typical compiled language and your typical 
interpreted language are pretty important.  If one language is 2x faster, 
hey, I can work around that -- but 100x faster is a bit much.

The only other scripting language I've looked at (and liked...for some 
reason Python doesn't do it for me) is Lua, which I happen to like a 
lot.  My complaints about Lua are that it's a moving target to some extent 
and there is a massive lack of information on it (no books, a couple 
references, and some open source projects).  Learning it is difficult 
because you basically have to learn by example and/or rely on the help of 
the many helpful people on the Lua mailing list (including lots of other 
game developers).

So, opinions on Ruby (specifically compared to other popular scripting 
languages)?

I've already integrated Lua into one project as an extension language and I 
do happen to like it quite a bit.  I haven't thought about writing an 
entire application in Lua or Ruby.

Oh, and if anyone has opinions on BETA or OCaml, I'm all ears =)

Brian