Re: [PATCH/RFC 0/7] Support for Ruby

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Patrick Donnelly <batrick@batbytes.com> wrote:
> Hello Felipe,
>
> On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 4:29 AM, Felipe Contreras
> <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 3:12 AM, Fredrik Gustafsson <iveqy@iveqy.com> wrote:
>>> And see my humble test of what the speedup would be for git-submodule
>>> even with a faulty lua integration (still forking... but huge
>>> performance boost anyway):
>>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/228031/focus=228051
>>
>> I don't see how that is relevant, but I'm certain the same can be done
>> with Ruby.
>>
>>> As you can see a lua integration would increase the git binary with
>>> 300kb.
>>
>> And my patch would increase it 49Kb.
>
> Unless you statically compile in Ruby (which is what the above quoted
> 300kb implied for Lua, in actually it is less than 200kb). [Also good
> luck statically compiling Python/Ruby into an executable.]

Yes, but that's not what the words said, the words said 'lua
integration' and 'ruby integration' would take that much. Either way
it doesn't matter, shared libraries exist for a reason. We don't need
to statically compile openssl do we? No? Good.

>> IMO the problem with lua is that it's too simple, it's syntax doesn't
>> resemble c, perl, python, shell, or ruby, it's just weird. Also, it's
>> much less popular, it's not as powerful, and there isn't a big
>> community involved with Git like with Ruby.
>
> *sigh*. At this point you've really cemented your purpose here as a
> language evangelist. It's unfortunate I have to reply to dismiss this
> FUD (which you complained about earlier, ironically) otherwise
> community accepts it as fact ("oh, I remember some guys saying Lua was
> a language for idiots...").

I dismissed the claim as FUD, when the conclusion was exaggerated, and
there was no evidence in sight.

When I say Ruby is a superior alternative, I provide evidence.

> Lua is by no means *simple*. Try "small" or "lightweight". Its syntax
> is engineered to be readable and amateur friendly. You've placed Ruby
> on a pedestal alongside those other major languages but its syntax
> doesn't resemble any of those.
>
>>Also, it's much less popular
>
> https://sites.google.com/site/marbux/home/where-lua-is-used
>
> The hallmark of a good embedded language is your users don't even know
> it is there.

Users don't even know in what language those projects are programmed,
that's irrelevant. If MediaWiki does indeed use Lua, it must be a tiny
fraction of it.

Lua is #25 in the tiobe index with 0.518%, Ruby is #13 with 1.382%,
right next to Perl. Ruby is 54 times used more in GitHub than Lua.
These are the numbers I have, if you have other numbers, please, share
them.

>>  it's not as powerful,
>
> This is really funny to me. Despite Lua's small size, it has lead the
> way for modern dynamic language features, such as coroutines, block
> level scoping and real closure, incremental GC, a simple and usable C
> API (*yes* this is a feature), and a register based VM [1]. It is
> consistently placed as the *fastest* dynamic language in existence
> [e.g. 2]? The LuaJIT compiler often achieves competitive or better
> performance than C [3]. What about this isn't powerful?

Talk is cheap, show me the code.

Do what I did. Add lua bindings for several C functions, replace a
script with a Lua script (like git request-pull), replace a major
builtin (like git reset), and show how this succinct example I
provided in Ruby would look like:

cb_data = 'foo'
for_each_ref() do |name, sha1, flags|
  puts '%s: %s: %s' % [cb_data, name, sha1_to_hex(sha1)]
end

Let's see how it looks.

Until you do that, I'd say you are the one that is language
evangelizing, I'm providing an actual real solution to a very
important problem.

-- 
Felipe Contreras