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 _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
