From: Tadashi Saito <shiba@...2.accsnet.ne.jp>
Date: 2008-02-16T12:09:57+09:00
Subject: [ANN] Decimal 0.0 released

Hello all,

I released Decimal 0.0 somehow, an arithmetic extension library for Ruby.

  http://decimal.rubyforge.org/

Decimal is the multi-precision decimal arithmetic library, which designed to
be comfortable with the existing Numeric classes first.  I'd like to make it
useful alike BigDecimal, that is in stdlib as you know.

My purpose of the release is "to release," so its tarball must contains many
bugs in contrast to full of NO documents.  However, I guess you can use it
like BigDecimals and Floats, because most of the methods you need are already
implemented briefly.


...needs other explanations?  Yep, I'll show you some commands and its
results, instead of detailed self-introduction.
(note that my product's name is shorter one)

$ cd ~/svn/ruby/trunk/ext/bigdecimal/
$ wc -c bigdecimal.[ch]
123348 bigdecimal.c
  8031 bigdecimal.h
131379 total

$ cd ~/svn/decimal/trunk/
$ wc -c decimal.c
 37997 decimal.c

$ time ruby -rbigdecimal -e 'BigDecimal("1.1") ** (2 ** 16)'

real    0m9.462s
user    0m9.433s
sys     0m0.008s

$ time ruby -rdecimal -e 'Decimal("1.1") ** (2 ** 16)'

real    0m0.338s
user    0m0.328s
sys     0m0.000s

$ cat mem.rb
def mem
  File.read("/proc/#{$$}/status").grep(/VmSize/)
end

$ ruby -rmem -rbigdecimal -e 'GC.disable; d=BigDecimal("1"); 2_000_000.times {d+d}; puts mem'
VmSize:   129208 kB

$ ruby -rmem -rdecimal -e 'GC.disable; d=Decimal(1); 2_000_000.times {d+d}; puts mem'
VmSize:    82340 kB


These improved your image? 

In addition, this is my first release of software products.  I'm little
unsure of myself, so I welcome any comments from the community to a novice.

# I hope it will be included in Ruby trunk, before the 1.9.0xFF was released.

-- 
Tadashi Saito