I think this could help Ruby regain some of its early excitement, and remove the negativity of its 'just a scripting language', 'only for rails, which is too slow for modern development anyway' image.
I would pay a decent chunk of money for a cleanly integrated MRI implementation inside of Rust, but I also will not be holding my breath for it.
Sounds extremely exciting!
Typos in the article: "slimed down", "you code could"
Is "needle_length = needle.length" actually necessary? I thought repeated calls would be zero cost, but I'm guessing I'm wrong.
Conceptually, a Set will do much better even with this sort of optimization.
And isn't there some common C lib that exposes Unicode functions like is_whitespace? Granted, using a cargo crate is easier than finding and adding a .h, and far easier than getting and linking another lib.
In this case, the coercion needs to ask Ruby for the encoding tag and ask Ruby to validate the encoding (which is does often enough that it's often cached) but after that we can safely coerce directly into a UTF8 string.
If we wanted to support other encodings, we could fall back to using Ruby's transcoding support (string.encode("UTF8")) and again, once someone does the work once it'll work for all helix users.
I wasn't present for the talk, just saw his slides.
Checking input, however, is a whole 'nother ballgame.
Anyway I think the same could be applied to Ruby Core as well. As I have been calling a Rusted Ruby for a long time.
Though I am not sure if this is a good thing for other Ruby implementation like JRuby.
Rust as far I know (not at all, honestly) doesn't interface with Java that well, so for JVM projects, it's nice to have a familiar language like Ruby that can tie in and make prototyping way easier.
I think people misunderstand how awesome Jruby is, because Ruby has never performed that well and Jruby has performed very well. Performance is not the only reason to both implementing a language. There's also the issue of mindshare, where a large group of people might already know Ruby, and it'd be easier in those scenarios to just give them Jruby and let them go to town than try and drag them through learning Java.
Rusty Ruby will do the same thing for Rust, I think. Rust is a very intricate, well-thought-out language, and I think it would benefit a lot from playing off the shared knowledge of thousands of Ruby users.
Besides that I really don't get why perforce are renaming their version control system yo Helix. Perforce is a well-known name, it seems weird to just drop a strong brand.
The article talked about 30 minutes to run through a "is this set of items in this other set of a bunch of items".
While it would probably make sense to do this efficiently in memory the reality is the company mentioned are probably doing it inefficiently in memory; asking some tool which can do this type of work effectively and is fairly well known was my basic suggestion.
Once they port all Rails libraries to Rust, you can still use the extremely-ergonomic Ruby programming language, but it won't be "slow as hell" anymore. And ruby performance is "tolerable in most circumstances" as-is.
I certainly agree that it could be awesome to have Rust on Rails for those who would find even Rails on Rust performance intolerable, and Iron's abstractions inadequate.
Rust provides a safer option - which is worthwhile. There have been several examples of gems with memory issues. It doesn't change anything, unless this is a general "Ruby is too slow" sort of rant.