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Comment by pdimitar

7 hours ago

> But why not simply write the code that needs to be fast in C and then use call it from Ruby?

Because often that's a can of worms and because people are not as good with C as they think they are, as evidenced by plenty of CVEs and the famous example of quadratic performance degradation in parsing a JSON file when the GTA V game starts -- something that a fan had to decompile and fix themselves.

For scripting these days I tend to author small Golang programs if bash gets unwieldy (which it quickly does; get to 100+ lines of script and you start hitting plenty of annoyances). Seems to work really well, plus Golang has community libraries that emulate various UNIX tools and I found them quite adequate.

But back to the previous comments, IMO both bash and Ruby are quite fine for basic scripting... if you don't care about startup time. I do care in some of my workflows, hence I made scripts that pipe various Golang / Rust programs to empower my flow. But again, for many tasks this is not needed.

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pdimitar

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zahlman  3 hours ago

> the famous example of quadratic performance degradation in parsing a JSON file when the GTA V game starts -- something that a fan had to decompile and fix themselves.

I actually hadn't heard this story. Is the gamedev world still averse to using proper modern C++ with basic tools like std::map and std::vector (never mind whatever else they've added since C++11 or so when I stopped paying attention)? Or else how exactly did they manage to mess it up? (And how big are the JSON files that this really matters, anyway?)

> IMO both bash and Ruby are quite fine for basic scripting... if you don't care about startup time.

`time bash -c ''` is only a couple of milliseconds on my system. The slow thing about a bash script, usually, is how much of the work you do by shelling out to other commands.