Re: Pathname#join is slow (Was: Re: [PATCH] Pathname.exists?())

On 10/25/05, Gavin Sinclair <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On 10/26/05, Ara.T.Howard <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>> Would a good solution be to implement Pathname in C?
> > >>
> > >> That certainlu couldn't hurt,
> > >
> > > No, it would hurt, writing it in C would make it more difficult to understand
> > > and change by non-C rubyists.
> >
> > amen.  heavy string manpulation and c do not belong in the same sentence.
>
> The implementation I had in mind would use the Ruby String methods
> rather than direct manipulation.  It would be short and fairly easy to
> read.

Well someone might want to give that a go. I tightened Pathname up
"real good" using an Array --which works very nicely as far as overall
design is concerned. For example:

def +(other)
    other = Pathname.new(other) unless Pathname === other
    return other if other.absolute?
    pth = @path + other.pathlist   # arrays
    pth.delete('.')
    Pathname.create(pth, @absolute, other.trail?)
end

But the speed only improved about 20%. I got my benchmark below a
second, but that's still almost 5 times slower than File.join.

Also I noticed that Pathname depends on File, Dir, FileUtils, FileTest
and Find. While I'd imagine there be some dependency (especially to
deal with cross-platform issues), this is much less self contained
then I imagined it would be.

T.