From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2012-02-03T11:03:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Basic Ruby performance


On Feb 2, 2012, at 17:36 , Josh Cheek wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> You're replacing a method call (a.match b) with a syntactic construct a =~
>> b, the latter of which bypasses method dispatch and goes straight to the
>> C-implimentation.
>> 
>> 
> Wow, I never knew that. I don't understand how it accomplishes this, a
> could be any kind of object with =~ defined anywhere on it, how can it
> bypass method dispatch?

MAGIC!

The code does extra type-checking at runtime.

>> IMHO re.match is just as useless as Regexp.new, Array.new, and Hash.new
>> (assuming no args/blocks passed).
> 
> 
> I usually use `meth Hash.new` instead of `meth({})` I think it looks
> cleaner.

def meth h = {}
  # ...
end

takes care of this entirely.