Ontwik

The point is you probably never need that performance gain on the VM level (YAGNI) at all. Things are changing very fast in software development, your project could die or fail long before you really think about performance optimization. When you start a project and think that my project will fail because Rails doesn’t scale, you are doing it all wrong! What you really need is a tool that helps you iterate faster. Rails falls into this category. And that’s the productivity gain that I am thinking when starting a company.

As a pragmatic approach,  a half century of software engineering says that you should write the code first and worry about making it faster only if it is too slow. Donald Knuth is right: Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Don’t merely let the VM performance metric blind you to this fundamental truth. If you are chasing performance, Java/Scala is not your ultimate solution, C/C++ is, even assemble language .

I actually don’t see a problem when “performance” emerging as the requirement in the Ruby world sooner than others, say Java/Scala, because this “sooner” is very contextual. To give you more info, GitHub is on RoR since it starts, and till now they haven’t hit the so-called “Rails do not scale” point. So are many other projects. Besides, think about Twitter, they only recently try to port everything to the JVM,  after Rails has served them a couple years. All these facts tell you, this “sooner” may never happen to your own app.