From: MenTaLguY <mental@...>
Date: 2007-06-22T04:28:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby extensions question..

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 03:55:11 +0900, Aaron Smith <beingthexemplary@gmail.com> wrote:
> One more question. Maybe this will end up having the same answer.. But
> let's say I have an object that I pass to the ruby extension. and all
> operations in the C code i'm doing are on that object passed using
> rb_funcall, rb_iv_get, etc. is it still seeing performance gains with C?

Usually not much.  Local variables are a little cheaper, and there's no AST-walking for evaluation, but that's about the extent of it.  Ruby method calls are a lot more expensive, so the big wins are when you can avoid Ruby method calls (i.e. rb_funcall) altogether.  Otherwise, it's just not worth the maintainability and portability problems.

-mental