From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2003-07-28T15:41:03+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby documentation generator?

On Mon, 28 Jul 2003 10:58:38 +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:55:16 +0900, gabriele renzi wrote:
>> <austin@halostatue.ca> ha scritto::
>>> When I'm done with PDF::Writer, I will be trying to add a PDF
>>> generator to RDoc. (PDF::Writer is a native Ruby -- that is, no C
>>> extensions required --
>> too cool! how fast could it be? I mean, could it be used for real time
>> pdf generation (apart from rdoc and the like)?
> I'm not quite sure how fast at this point. I am pretty sure it will
> require 1.8, but I haven't had a chance to test the latest version here
> (I had to restore my system last week and I think that I'm just now back
> up to speed). It requires some level of object transactional support, and
> the Transaction::Simple that I released a couple of weeks ago is
> painfully slow on Win32. Without the transactional stuff, it doesn't work
> properly -- but it was relatively fast on what it does do (~20 seconds to
> make a 60k document). The transactional stuff under 1.6 slowed it down to
> > 1 hour. I will be trying 1.8 tomorrow, I think.

Okay. I just tried it with an *old* version of 1.8 (1.8.0-9) on Win32 and 
the speed isn't ~20 seconds, but it's less than ~60 seconds at this point. 
The output is slightly buggered, but I think I can fix that in other ways. 
I'll have to trace around the output to figure out exactly why it's not 
right. Then I can move forward to the rest of it.

After I do that, I'm going to clean up the API to be more Ruby-like (it's 
still very PHPish) and then I will post something alpha-level. The code will 
work and be usable, but I have plans for the internals that may also affect 
the externals (PDF documents use a lot of references; I can make it so that 
the references are finalized only at document creation time instead of at 
add time, which will make everything easier).

-austin
--
austin ziegler    * austin@halostatue.ca * Toronto, ON, Canada
software designer * pragmatic programmer * 2003.07.28
                                         * 02.36.48