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Ruby Fibonacci Shootout, Part 2

2010-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

This is just a quick update on a short post I wrote a few days ago where I compared the speed of a few different Ruby VM's using a simple recursive Fibonacci algorithm (compliments of this article) to see just how well the new MacRuby VM stacks up to the rest of them. The results had me pleasantly surprised when MacRuby blew them all away and was even able to compete with a C version (unoptimized—of course) of the same code.

Well, today as I was, once again, perusing the links on Proggit, I came across this tempting little morsel: "LuaJIT makes Lua nearly as fast as Fortran on the Benchmarks Game". Considering that my interests in MacRuby are mainly to find a fast scripting language that is enjoyable to use and easily embeddable within a Cocoa application, I couldn't resist checking out the latest LuaJIT compiler to see how it performed on the same test relative to MacRuby. Below is the Lua code that I used to perform the tests:

The results below show Lua's best time compared to the latest MacRuby implementation.

LuaJIT 1.1.5

real 0m2.068s user 0m2.049s sys...



Ruby Fibonacci Shootout
2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00
As I was perusing Proggit yesterday, I ran across a little rant in reply to an earlier blog post on the speed improvements of the new Ruby 1.9 VM vs Python. The Python article was a bit unfair in its assessment of Python's speed vs Ruby's since the author essentially translated a highly recursive algorithm into an iterative one and used that for his comparison. Nevertheless, it did get me a bit more interested in just how much better the new Ruby VM's are performing. After trying the tests in the original article a few times and being truly impressed with Ruby 1.9's nearly 5x speed improvement over the old 1.8 VM, I thought why not give MacRuby a try since it is supposed to be a highly optimized Ruby VM for my computing platform of choice, and let me tell ya, it did not disappoint.
 For those of you who are not in the know, MacRuby is a port of Ruby 1.9 for Mac OS X. But where MacRuby differs from other ports of Ruby to the Mac platform, is in its implementation details. MacRuby is built directly on top of Objective-C and, thus, shares...


A New Year, A New Blog
2010-01-12T00:00:00+00:00
Ah, a new year and a new beginning. I love the start of a new year, it gives me a chance to press the reset button and completely obliterate the chaos that has accumulated during the past year. At the start of every new year, I get a chance to to do a full system wipe and begin anew with a fresh install. Of course, I'm speaking metaphorically of my life in general and not of my laptop. At the beginning of each new year, I try my best to put the brakes on all of my extracurricular activities and decide which ones are important enough to carry on into the new year and which are mere obstacles to my coming year's successes. To use another metaphor, This is the time when I decide my route for the coming year and try my best to remove all other detours that may take me miles off course and set me back on my journey. In this post I want to address the very first of these obstacles that I've decided to get rid of this year, namely my overly complicated and utterly unenjoyable blogging setup.
 Past Blogging Failures
 Roughly two years...


The Road to Independence
2009-10-08T00:00:00+00:00
I have been busy, busy, busy, but I have finally found, correction, made the time (I mean sleep when you're dead, right?) to write the second post in my series on creating a small software business. So, considering that time is very short these days, let's just get right down to brass tacks, what have I been up to with respect to this journey I've set out for myself?
 To keep my posts organized, I've tried to come up with a list of areas in which I will discuss my progress during the life of the product and of the company. Each of those areas is detailed below with a small summary of what I've been doing in each for the past time period (in this case the past month).
 Design
 Well, first and foremost, I've worked on the design of my first application a bit more, fleshing out some of the details of how the app will work. The design of the GUI itself will stay roughly similar to my first draft until I can get something coded up that I can play around with. I did have another little breakthrough though with respect to application design—a second application...


The Road to Independence
2009-09-11T00:00:00+00:00
For a while now, I have had three goals in the back of my mind that I hope to accomplish within my lifetime. The first is to write a book, probably a technical book of some sort. Second, get my Ph.D., most likely in Computer Science, but if not it will be in something that has a lot in common with CS. And, the third, would be to start my own company. Now by company, I don't mean Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc, etc. What I mean is a micro-ISV (Independent Software Vendor, for the uninitiated). I don't particularly care if this company never turns into anything more than a fun little — and hopefully, at least slightly lucrative — side project. The main benefit that I hope to take away from starting my own company is the experience and the permission to say that I, unlike so many others out there, was not defeated by my own fear of failure, and, as a result, I was able to provide something of value to the world based totally on my own ideas and hard work.
 So, in an attempt to prod myself along into realizing at least one...