From: Charles Mills <cmills@...>
Date: 2005-10-27T05:23:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Time for built-in Rational and Complex classes?


On Oct 26, 2005, at 7:51 AM, Gavin Sinclair wrote:

> On 10/26/05, Mathieu Bouchard <matju@artengine.ca> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 26 Oct 2005, Charles Mills wrote:
>>
>>> A C version could be created using the regular extension  
>>> mechanisms.  I
>>> personally would like to see a faster complex class.  Also  
>>> implementing GCD in
>>> C would speed up the rational class substantially.
>>>
>>
>> I think that just recoding the GCD in C would make a big  
>> difference that
>> would reduce the need for recoding the rest of Rational in C.
>>
>> For the Complexes, I hope that recoding it in C wouldn't reduce its
>> functionality. Right now, one can make not only Complex Floats,  
>> but also
>> Complex Rationals and Complex (Gaussian) Integers.
>>
>
> Wouldn't it be a matter of doing a direct port from the current Ruby
> code, which hasn't changed in at least two years, to C?  Even better,
> to "Ruby extension C"?  I.e. no loss of functionality.
>
> Gavin
>

I don't see why not.  But using GCD as an example the C version would  
have to handle fixnums, bignums and arbitrary types that respond to  
+,-,*,/,etc.  You could just do a straight translation into C using  
rb_funcall(), but if you wanted to see a speed up for the common case  
(fixnum and bignum) than it would require handling those cases  
specially (using arithmetic in C and the rb_big_*() functions).

Is there a more straight forward solution?

-Charlie