From: intc_ctor@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-01-29T02:59:54+09:00
Subject: Re: rjni

Mauricio Fern�ndez <batsman.geo@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<20040127203721.GA1823@student.ei.uni-stuttgart.de>...
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 03:09:56AM +0900, Phil Tomson wrote:
> > Please _do_ release it.  Perhaps you won't be having time to work on
> > it in the future, but others may want to work on it.  In fact if you
> > don't think you'll be having time to work on it that's all the more
> 
> I have to confess it's not a matter of time -- it's just that I'm facing
> the need to rewrite it all in C (for performance) and frankly that's no
> fun :-|

Would it be premature optimization?  In other words, do you have all
the functionality you need with Ruby code yet?  If you don't rewrite
in C is the performance in Ruby acceptable?

I think in most cases performance is probably acceptable.  In cases
like this, I  (as a user) like having the option of using the pure
Ruby implementation if possible because I'm not always in a position
to compile the extension.  So I would recommend that when you do the
rewrite in C that you not actually replace the Ruby code, but offer it
as an option.

for example:

begin
  require 'rjni.so' #try for the C implementation first
rescue LoadError
  require 'rjni.rb' #if it's not available use the ruby implementation
end  

Or, perhaps for the time being while you're implementing parts of it
in C you could do something like:

require 'rjni.rb'
begin
  require 'rjni_speedup.so'
rescue LoadError
  puts "no speed up available for now; going with pure Ruby
implementation"
end

Where rjni_speedup.so contains the C implementations for various
methods that could benefit from a C implementation.  That way you
don't have to think that you need to rewrite everything over in C
before you can release, you can release small chunks of C
implementation as you have time.

> 
> I'll clean it a bit, add some docs and release it as another technology
> preview.
 
cool.

Phil