Elsewhere

I've stumbled across several great snippets of Ruby code on the Web in the past few weeks, and rather than bore you with a post on each one, here's a whole collection at once:

Evan Weaver had a basic problem to solve:

Benchmarking with httperf is a new screencast by Geoffrey Grosenbach in his Peepcode series of Ruby / Rails related videos. It costs $9, but for that you get a bundle of source code and a very high quality video of 53 minutes' length.

Following on from the bumper Ruby interpreter performance tests by Antonio Cangiano two weeks ago, Xue Yong Zhi decided to run the same performance suite on XRuby Ruby to JVM compiler and found that XRuby is faster than the Ruby interpreter in 26 out of 38 tests. It's interesting to note that the failing tests are the same as those for the official Ruby interpreter on Windows (stack exhaustion?) so in the scope of these performance tests XRuby appears to be more feature complete than interpreters such as Cardinal and Rubinius that fail many of the tests.

Heiko Webers writes:

A month ago, Pat Eyler (On Ruby), Apress, and I launched a Ruby blogging challenge with the question, "How Has Ruby Blown Your Mind?" .. There were 18 solid entries, and one late entry by Sean Hussey that I think would have won if it hadn't come late. The eventual winner was Ruby Blocks as Closures by Gabe de Silveira, and he wins three Apress books of his choosing. Well done Gabe!