(almost) murphy.de

Ruby about to overtake Perl, 2 years after Python did

Thu 2009-12-31 ( En pr )

But it’s more due to Perl being so unpopular lately. Ruby stagnates; maybe Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3, JRuby, MacRuby and Gemcutter can make Ruby more interesting in the future.

Update: It seems my prediction was wrong. But I wait another month before I take it back :)

Update: Epic fail. I was totally wrong; instead, Ruby is out of the Top 10 (Delphi took its place again). Every Top 10 language except C and Perl seems to weaken because of the advent of Objective-C and Google Go (the so-called company languages).

Highlighting E4X

Wed 2009-12-30 ( pr En )

A cool feature of JavaScript 1.6 is called E4X:

var xhtml = <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
        <head>
                <title>Embedded SVG demo</title>
        </head>
        <body>
                <h1>Embedded SVG demo</h1>
                <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" 
                        viewBox="0 0 100 100">
                        <circle cx="50"
                                cy="50"
                                r="20"
                                stroke="orange"
                                stroke-width="2px"
                                fill="yellow" />
                </svg>
        </body>
</html>;

alert(xhtml.name().localName); // Alerts “html”
alert(xhtml.name().uri); // Alerts “http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”

I’m trying to highlight this syntax with CodeRay, but it’s a bit more complicated than I thought.

A Chessboard Sphere with WebGL

Sun 2009-11-29 ( En pr pi )

The last weeks I have been experimenting with WebGL, the upcoming 3D extension to the HTML 5 Canvas element. It is supported by the latest WebKit and Firefox nightly builds (read about getting WebGL to run on your system).

Now, here’s a rotating ~~500~~ ~~4000~~ about 4900 polygon semi-transparent 3D sphere complete with a texture and lightning, animated via OpenGL by your graphics card – no Flash plugin needed (click the image):

If you want to stay updated about this developing technology, you can subscribe to the Planet WebGL meta-blog feed.

I can also recommend Giles’ step-by-step tutorials on learningwebgl.com, which I based my sphere example on.

This is just the beginning :) Some people are already creating games, demoscenes, and Viewers for 3D models with WebGL.

Update: Much faster mesh generation, more polygons. Always use Array.push instead of Array.concat.

Update 2: The Mesh library is now a separate file. Fixed some bugs with mesh generation.

Ruby performance

Sun 2009-10-04 ( En pr )

In my tests, Ruby 1.8.7 runs simple benchmarks about 3-8% faster than 1.8.6 – that’s nice!

But Ruby 1.9.1 is far more fast, with speedups up to 2x for some real-life cases, and a reliable speedup around 10-20%.

JRuby performs better than 1.8, sometimes even better than 1.9, but only for longer tasks. For short benchmarks and day-to-day tasks, it’s often 2 or 3 times slower than any C-Ruby. The startup time is around 1 second, and thus JRuby is not the right tool for scripting tasks. It runs best on Java 6.

(almost) murphy.de

Draw here!

Zugreifen!

Waldkitas sind langweilig!

github commit comments

nVidia Forums

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