Antonio Cangiano

I have to agree with Nutter - MacRuby is nowhere near a complete implementation and there is absolutely no point trying to judge its performance until it is. See last year's MagLev debacle for precedent. You were right on board with that train wreck, if I recall correctly, and let me assure you the few of us who poured skepticism on their numbers are feeling pretty vindicated by now.

Another problem I have is the use of these artificial benchmarks to judge speed at all. Time and time again experience has shown that benchmark performance has little relevance in the real world. For example, your most recent Ruby 1.9 benchmarks post:

http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/10/reflections-on-the-ruby-shootout/

shows Ruby 1.9 coming out 250% faster than 1.8. 250%! This is an absolutely meaningless figure. I have recently posted my own benchmarks of actual production 1.8.6 and 1.9.1 installations running an actual real world program (Rails) serving an actual production web site and the performance gain is closer to 15%:

http://fukamachi.org/wp/2009/03/27/thin-ruby-191-vs-ruby-186/

I will not pretend that my quick and dirty testing is any kind of canonical "last word" result but on the other hand, I also can say with absolute certainty that no sizable app is going to experience anywhere near a 250% speed increase from Ruby 1.9. These benchmarks are worse than nothing, they're completely misleading. I am all for getting everyone onto 1.9 but geeze!

And of course you can't even run…

That's not true: he was able to write the right software at the right time[1], when nobody else had will/time/whatever to scratch their own itch. The Mongrel HTTP library is today the de-facto standard for running Rails applications, and on it companies like Engine Yard based their business.

Like was previously said in this thread, he's a passionate hacker, and puts his passion on his sleeve. While I don't particularly appreciate the excess of harsh in his posts, I consider it no different than Torvalds writing "You're full of shit" on LKML.

The main problem here is about the "people" perception about whate they find "written on the internet", and their constant need of finding an hero to follow: in this scenario, if you're a respected and known developer, you simply cannot ignore your influence on the "crowd" and you have to measure the harshness of your writeups.

I think that the one that best described this situation was Antonio Cangiano, on his blog post "Let's all grow up": http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/01/28/lets-all-grow-up

[1] http://markmail.org/message/g6e4loorw3p7plsk

I looked into 'The Rails Way' over the weekend. As vdm correctly says, its definitely a very comprehensive reference. And it makes as a good book, but you definitely need to work with a basic tutorial to get you up and running quickly. I would recommend "Agile Web Development with Rails" but with Rails 2.0 although its a little behind the curve, its not a bad book.

I am currently reading "Practical Social Networking Sites with Rails", and although its a decent book, the author tends to skip some of the most important details, leaving you wondering how something came about. I would not recommend it.

I have read 'Ruby for Rails', and its definitely a good book. David Black is a very good author and teaches you Ruby and shows you how a lot of the 'black-magic' in Rails happens.

Here is someone else's review of some of the books -
http://antoniocangiano.com/rails-books/

For Ruby, I would recommend Peter Cooper's book over Programming Ruby any day... especially if you are new to Ruby and/or OOP in general.

Although this is what should happen, it doesn't quite seem to be the case. Pretty much every other ruby implementation destroys Rubinius in terms of performance. It's also worthwhile to note that 1.9/YARV, which is bytecoded, destroys every other ruby implementation and should actually be a major boost to Rails once the compatibility issues are worked out (Matz released 1.9 during Christmas of 2007, but it's just the developer version). You can see benchmarks here:

http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/02/19/ruby-implementations-shootout-ruby-vs-yarv-vs-jruby-vs-gardens-point-ruby-net-vs-rubinius-vs-cardinal/

You can also see how 1.9 fares against 1.86 directly in the code shootout:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv

Rubinius seems to offer some nice support in terms of running reliable ruby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubinius), but in terms of performance and actual usability, it has a long way to go.

Sigh, not that nonsense comparison again.

Apart from using suboptimal Lua code (the author obviously doesn't know about the Lua keyword 'local'), LuaJIT beta2 didn't compile recursion at all. It runs more than 4x faster with the current version and beats MacRuby easily.

Oh, and comparing language implementations based on the speed of a recursive Fibonacci number generator has exactly zero real-world relevance. Try again with a more realistic mix of benchmarks or something domain-specific like SciMark (LuaJIT is only 30% slower than GCC on this one).

Judging from http://antoniocangiano.com/2010/05/16/benchmarking-macruby-0-6/ MacRuby plays in the same league as the other Ruby implementations. And http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all tells you where that league can be found, relative to LuaJIT. Hint: scroll to the bottom. :-)

There's alotta rails books coming out, see amazon. This list is not up to date, either:

http://antoniocangiano.com/rails-books/

I recommend, in addition to the 2 lists, Ediger's "Advanced Rails", Rappin's "Professional Rails", and Ezra Z/Pragmatic's "Deploying Rails" . Haven't seen AWDWR vers. 3 beta, but Pragmatic's betas are usually worth reading after the first revision or 2

the last thread re:rails books

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=162210