>The Ruby implementation has a subtle mistake which causes signficantly more work than it needs to.
To be fair, I do not think that is a "mistake" as such. I have written Ruby professionally for 6 years or so and have committed to several Ruby open source projects and haven't seen an innocus `nil` sitting at the end of a loop, to prevent array allocation.
The argument would be fair, if it wasn't idiomatic Ruby.
More like - knowing internals of a language will allow one to gain more performance out of it. That has been true for almost every programming language, but general speaking the goal of a VM based language is to not require that _specialized_ knowledge.
To be fair, I do not think that is a "mistake" as such. I have written Ruby professionally for 6 years or so and have committed to several Ruby open source projects and haven't seen an innocus `nil` sitting at the end of a loop, to prevent array allocation.
The argument would be fair, if it wasn't idiomatic Ruby.
More like - knowing internals of a language will allow one to gain more performance out of it. That has been true for almost every programming language, but general speaking the goal of a VM based language is to not require that _specialized_ knowledge.