From: Kyle Schmitt <kyleaschmitt@...>
Date: 2009-03-05T04:43:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Compiling a Ruby app

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:58 PM, Randall Alexander
<randall.alexander@gmail.com> wrote:
> The Spring Framework uses a lot of reflection yet many would not call it
> trivial.  We use reflection in our enterprise because it is the best way to
> solve a problem.
Fair enough.  I never argued that it wasn't the best way to solve some
problems, just that the last time I used a heavily reflected compiled
app (2007?) it was a dog.  I should have made it more clear that in my
experiences were with .Net applications.

> If your runtime engine does look aheads (which many modern ones do) then the
> interpreter can have the class evaluated and loaded before it is ever used.
> One of the factors of that working is the size of the class and everything
> the class needs.  We ran a few tests for our enterprise and determined that
> if the class was not a heavy weight class then there was no real performance
> penalty (i.e. response time).  Ironically it actually speed things up over
Ahh.  The ones I was working in had some pretty heavy classes.  Maybe
reflection wasn't the best way then.  I dunno.  Would you say that a
caveat for efficient reflection is fairly light-weight classes?

--Kyle