From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2008-02-17T11:51:33+09:00
Subject: Re: very bad character performance on ruby1.9

Eric Mahurin wrote:
> I'd like to bring up the issue of how characters are represented in ruby 
> 1.9 from a performance standpoint.  In a recent ruby-quiz (parsing 
> JSON), the fastest pure-ruby solution was simply an LL(1) parser that 
> looked at one character at a time (it beat various Regexp solutions).  
> With ruby 1.9, the runtime increased by 4X making it a slow solution.  A 
> simple benchmark is at the end of this message that counts words in an 
> LL(1) fashion.  With ruby 1.8.6, it can could the words in Homer's Iliad 
> in 1.46s on my machine and in ruby 1.9 (from ubuntu gutsy) it takes 
> 52.87s (36X increase in runtime).

Interesting benchmark; may I include it in JRuby's collection of benchmarks?

- Charlie