Re: Ruby?

[Sean Middleditch <sean.middleditch@...>]

Martin Dvorak wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I apologize for my little off-topic and little inappropriate question,
> but I'd like to know whether anybody on this list can share
> any positive or negative experience with programming language
> Ruby? Especially how is it fast, is it easily embeddable, does
> it have supporting community etc.
>

Ruby is excellent.  I haven't timed it, but it's supposedly one of the
fastest scripted languages around (that's like it's #1 most touted
plus).  And it's super easy to embed.  I have it embedded in a hour,
including wrapper to 3 custom C++ classes, without even touching
something like SWIG.

I'm not sure on the community, I haven't gotten much involved yet.
Something I plan to do, though.

I'm also not sure how it compares to Lua, either.  I do know that the
syntax for Ruby can be a bit odd (which is a bit understandable, seeing
as how its primary author is Japanese... his idea of a good language must
be different than any latin-based language).  I think Ruby is faster than
Lua, but is probably harder to get used to... also, it doesn't have quite
as large of a user base as Lua does, at least not here in the States
(although it's supposedly incredably popular in Japan).

http://www.ruby-lang.org has lots of info, although the on-line
documentation is horrendously out of date (docs are for 1.4, although 1.6
is the current stable version).

Sean Middleditch

>
> Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
>
> Martin