From: Carl Youngblood <carl@...>
Date: 2004-06-10T01:52:49+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby and mustard

Charles Comstock wrote:

>On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Ara.T.Howard wrote:
>  
>
>>these are the options i've been mulling over.  lately, however, i'm starting
>>to favour this option:
>>
>>   * just code it in c using ruby's builtin libs.  gives you hashes, eval'ing
>>     code, lists, GC, etc.  i'm not adding additional dependancies and
>>     guarunteed (if my c stays pretty posix) that my code will run where ruby
>>     will.  don't need autotools, no stl., etc. etc.
>>
>>are there any other options i'm missing?
>>
>>what do you do when it needs to be __really__ fast BUT you also have to
>>develop it __really__ fast and would __prefer__ not to add dependancies.
>>    
>>
>
>Have you taken a look at rubyinline?  It lets you embed compiled c
>code inline in the middle of a ruby script.  That way if you need to
>run a fast loop you can switch to C but the cheap code that takes a
>while in C is still doable in ruby.  Can't remember the url for it,
>should find it if you google.  I want to say it's zenspiders work.
>
>Charlie
>
All of this discussion about C also reminds me that C code can itself be 
optimized considerably.  If you really want to squeeze the last drop out 
of performance you can sometimes get even a twenty-fold improvement by 
doing architecture-specific optimizations.  There are also plenty of 
platform-agnostic optimizations that can be done. A good book on this is 
/Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective/, Randal E. Bryant and 
David O'Hallaron.

Carl