From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2010-01-18T18:05:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Manipulating big hunks of data

2010/1/17 Seebs <usenet-nospam@seebs.net>:
> Is there any kind of container-like-thing in Ruby for the special case
> of a large number of fixed-type-datums?  (As opposed to objects.)
>
> Basically, imagine that I have, for instance, a huge matrix of data.
> So far as I can tell, that really means a huge selection of individual
> objects, all allocated possibly using separate chunks of memory, because
> they all have to be, well, objects -- they can't just be raw data.  Obviously,
> using any given item in the matrix is convenient if they're all already
> objects, but the storage looks like it'd be ridiculously large.
>
> Is this just not idiomatic in Ruby?  Is there some base class or object
> type I haven't spotted yet which handles cases like this?

Since everything is an object in Ruby (well, almost) I am not sure
what to make of your distinction.  What I often do in these situations
is this

unifier = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k.freeze] = k}
# read or create lots of stuff
item = unifier[item]

That way you keep at least only one version of a set of equivalent
objects.  This helps of course only if you have repetitive values.

Depending on your use case another approach could be to store in a
single (or multiple) Strings and use #pack and #unpack.  I guess this
works best if your data is uniformly sized.

Btw, what volume of data are we talking about?

Kind regards

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/