[ruby-core:30975] Re: [Feature #1478] Ruby archive

Headius, I'm not against for the idea of archiving itself, and I don't think
compressions being evil.  I'm just doubtful on it.

(2010/06/30 18:59), Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 1:21 PM, Urabe Shyouhei <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> That's what I'm in doubt.  At the time of its appearance jar needed compression
>> because java aimed to be network-oriented.  But definitely our browser don't
>> run ruby.
> 
> We have users running JRuby in applets in browsers with jar-compressed
> scripts. It's pretty easy to do, and very handy to distribute a single
> compressed file.

That's because you're on Java.  Not all the ruby impls can do that.

> We also have folks starting to use JRuby on Android, where we also
> support loading scripts out of compressed jar files (since that is
> again the format for all Android application archives).

You mean a Ruby's archive format should be targeted to Android?  I don't think
so.  The archiving format's main users should be a normal Ruby user.

# No, I'm not ignoring Android.  I just think that's too platform-specific.
# If compression is vital to Android you can take strategy like tar.gz.

> And JRuby's "jruby-complete.jar" is all of JRuby plus the Ruby
> standard library in a single 10-11MB file, where JRuby alone is about
> 8-9MB of that. It would be closer to 18-19MB if we could not compress
> stdlib into the jar file, and the "complete" jar's execution makes
> heavy use of loading scripts out of the jar itself, similar to what
> the new Ruby archive format could enable. The "complete" jar is used
> in many prepackaged JRuby applications that need a single distribution
> file.

Yes, something like it should be handy.  But the question: should it be
compressed?  You might not be aware of the decompression cost of such archive
because you all JVM users are blinded by the VM's quite sloooooooow startup,
but when it gets more faster than it is now like YARV does today, that can
potentially be a problem.

> The use of jars and compressed jars is a very common, very useful tool
> for JRuby users, and we've supported it for over four years. If Ruby
> is going to adopt a standard archive format, it would seem rather
> strange to ignore what we've done (and what users are doing) in JRuby
> today.

I agree with this sentence.  JRuby should be studied in detail.