[OSM-dev] Re: [OSM-talk] Prototype OSM renderer showing road types, place names and contours

[Nick Hill]

1Nick Whitelegg wrote:

> 
> I'm not averse to converting it to Ruby, so if there is a need to do it 
> I'd be happy to myself. On the other hand I am keen to extend the features 
> of the existing code (e.g. customisation - see Etienne's post)

Ruby appears to be a neat and clean OO implementation, but I understand 
this implementation comes at a substantial penalty in terms of 
processing and I/O over other interpreted languages.

I have run Ruby tests on a medium I/O loaded machine. The Ruby test 
suite performance was really hammered, Ruby could only use 1/5th of the 
available processor. I gather from this that Ruby is very I/O intensive, 
  even when the target code is already in memory, which is not good for 
servers. (Run Bittorrent then compile ruby then run the test suite
#> time make test-all    you'll see what I mean).

For lighter duty tasks, Ruby may be OK. But perhaps we shouldn't ee-code 
into Ruby for heavier duty tasks.