From: Mauricio Fernandez <mfp@...>
Date: 2008-02-18T20:53:34+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] FastRI 0.3.1: faster, Leopard compatibility, etc.

On Thu, Feb 07, 2008 at 07:52:20AM +0900, Eric Hodel wrote:
> On Feb 3, 2008, at 07:40 AM, botp wrote:
> >On Feb 3, 2008 1:07 AM, Mauricio Fernandez <mfp@acm.org> wrote:
> >>FastRI is an alternative to the ri documentation browser for Ruby.
> >
> >forgive the dumb question, but how can i make fastri work for ruby1.9?
> >thanks for fri/qri, mauricio.  'm very much dependent on it now :)

I haven't ported it to 1.9 yet, mainly because 1.9.0 is still too unstable.
It shouldn't be hard, though.

> Are you really concerned about 1/10 of a second?  (All times with hot  
> cache.)
> 
> $ time ri -f plain Array#fetch > /dev/null
> real	0m0.589s
[...]
> $ time qri -f plain Array#fetch > /dev/null
> real	0m0.110s
[...]
> $ time ri19 -f plain Array#fetch > /dev/null
> real	0m0.208s
[...]

1/10th of a second does matter in some cases (e.g. if qri is being called by an
editor to display "live" documentation), but the behavior when the cache isn't
hot matters much more to me:

(worst case, cold cache)

$ time qri -f plain Array#fetch > /dev/null

real	0m3.690s
...
$ time ri -f plain Array#fetch > /dev/null

real	0m32.235s
...
$ time ri19 -f plain Array#fetch > /dev/null
[...]
[BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.9.0 (2007-12-20) [i686-linux]

Aborted

real	0m6.141s


I rarely refer to the RI documentation nowadays, but I definitely don't want
to wait for several seconds (the average case observed in practice, with a
"temperate cache") when I do, to have ri tell me something like this:

$ ri -T collect_file
More than one method matched your request. You can refine
your search by asking for information on one of:

     Test::Unit::Collector::Dir#collect_file,
     Test::Unit::Collector::Dir#collect_file,
     Test::Unit::Collector::Dir#collect_file,
     Test::Unit::Collector::Dir#collect_file,
     Test::Unit::Collector::Dir#collect_file

Unfortunately, ri is so slow and buggy that many (me included) find it
unusable. FastRI is just an usable ri with some extra features (working
RubyGems support, full-text search, configurable lookup order, better search
strategies, etc.).

-- 
Mauricio Fernandez  -   http://eigenclass.org