[OSM-dev] Ruby developers in Amsterdam

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Matt Amos wrote:
> what do you see as the benefits of an old-fashioned compiled language
> (presumably you mean C/C++/Java) over just plain ruby? just because
> we're using ruby doesn't mean we have to use rails+activerecord :-)

I think nothing beats C/C++ (not so sure about Java) when it comes to 
pumping bytes from one source to one destination with as little memory 
usage and as little copying of data as possible. I also think that we're 
at least partially operating in areas where it really makes a difference 
what kind of read or write operation you use, how many bytes you send in 
one buffer, how many you request from the database driver, and so on. 
(And the optimum performance settings may well be different for a MySQL 
and a PostGIS backend, so I tend to say "no thank you" if anyone wants 
to sell me a super duper database wrapper that makes everything database 
"agnostic".)

In 99.9% of applications nobody gives a damn whether some dynamic 
programming language allocates the same memory three times in a row and 
copies the same data from one location to the next, to the next - it's 
over in microseconds and nobody notices, and you're better off writing 
worse-performing better-looking code than squeezing the last juice out 
of your CPU.

OSM might be one of the 0.1%. But I might also be wrong.

Bye
Frederik