We want amp to be fast. Like, as fast as possible. The biggest problem: Ruby isn't very fast. So here's our current goal: we want amp to be as fast as mercurial.
Amp is written in Ruby, which according to the Great Language Shootout is 3-10 times slower than Python. That's for MRI 1.8.6 - here's a link to JRuby and Ruby 1.9, which are similar though an improvement.
We hope to have some direct, auto-generated benchmarks up here soon. But for now - many amp operations are only 1.5-2 times slower than Mercurial. That's within the range that the language barrier is the major factor. Of course, we hope to do better.
What's interesting about amp is that most applications concerned with speed are optimizing long-running processes. Servers, web apps, graphics processes come to mind. But amp is completely different - VCS clients are invoked dozens of times a day. We need the process to just end fast. That means it needs to start quickly, run quickly, and clean up quickly.
We're finding a lot of ways to achieve this, and will be writing some blog posts now that amp is being looked at.
Head on over the contribute page and join us! There's plenty of places where we can optimize code (or even if you want to help get some auto-generated benchmarks on this page, that'd be awesome too!)
