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I would venture to say the triviality of writing hybrid code is a function of how often you have done something similar, and how well you understand the underlying principles. This is really the case with any software problem.

Ruby provides some very useful features, but a lot of those come at rather high costs. Those costs are exacerbated if you do not understand how the internal components of the language are laid out, and the purpose behind this layout.

Ruby tries to be a lot of things to a lot of people, so then when people learn how to use it for one task they automatically assume that their skills will carry over. This sort of approach might work reasonably well with a straight-forward compiled language, but this it simply can't be that easy for an interpreted language like ruby, with it's reams of special context sensitive behaviour.

For example, consider the "pointers to pointers to pointers" complaint. Nothing is stopping you from having a low level C struct for all your performance sensitive data. Granted, you would have to write a ruby wrapper for this data for when you need to export it back out to ruby, but wrapper generation could be automated.

Sure, you could just say, "You know what. I'm just going to use C" but what if your project could really use some of those ruby features outside of the performance sensitive parts of the code? It's always a tradeoff.



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