From: Gustav Munkby <grddev@...>
Date: 2007-09-04T16:35:11+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Twisting a Rope (#137)

> CPU(user+sys,sec)   mem(peak,MB)
> ------------------- ------------
>  build  sort  total build  sort  class
>  -----  ----  ----- -----  ----  -----
>   0.10  1.70   1.80   287  1327  String
>   0.01  0.27   0.28    22   153  Porth::Rope
>   0.02  0.83   0.85    22    34  Choudhury::Rope *
>   0.02  0.06   0.08    22    29  Mahurin::StringRope +
>   0.00  0.08   0.08    22    30  Mahurin::DenormalStringRope +
>   0.02  0.14   0.16    22    29  Mahurin::MutableStringRope
>   0.07  0.10   0.17   151   151  Munkby::ArrayRope
>   0.02  0.73   0.75    22   655  Kalenkovich::Rope *

Thanks for running the tests!  I do think it is a shame, however,
that the table does not include the notion of safety that I mentioned
in my submission. If any of these classes should every go into a
gem as ara mentioned, the user of that gem at least ought to be
able to choose the safe version.

Here is a very simple scenario where such a problem is introduced.
One could probably do worse changes to the source strings, but this
was the first example I came up with.

ss = %w[test append]
r1, r2 = ss.map {|x| Mahurin::StringRope.new(x) }
r1 <<= r2
ss.first << "ing"
r1.length # => 10
r1.to_s.length # => 13

I have only tested Mahurin::StringRope, but would like to know for
which other classes I need to be extra careful when adding strings
to the rope. I did find, however, that by removing my "safety dups",
the combined running time (on my machine) is about the same for
my solution as for Mahurin::StringRope.

!g