Question

I just thought of something: if ruby is just a scripting language: wouldn’t that mean that variables and method names that are long would run / get called slower than if they had shorter names? I think they would run slower due to string searching and manipulation.

But, I’m no computer scientist, so.. this is too low level for me.

is there a way to run a rails app with compiled code?

Answer 1

You should not worry about variable name lengths.

You should be worrying about writing readable code instead. Iron is cheap nowadays, brains are not 🙂

And yes, sometimes you can compile Ruby.

Rubinius allows compilation to bytecode.
MacRuby compiles to native code.