From: Sam Smoot <ssmoot@...>
Date: 2008-02-17T03:29:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Decimal 0.0 released

On Feb 15, 8:59 pm, Tadashi Saito <sh...@mail2.accsnet.ne.jp> wrote:
> 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

Very nice. I'd love to see this developed further. As a contributor to
DataMapper, one of the things I'm most interested in is faster/less-
memory-hungry "Primitive" types.

I could see a library like yours having a big impact... keep up the
good work, and please, let us know the moment you think it's ready for
wide-spread use! :-)