From: intc_ctor@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-01-29T09:04:55+09:00
Subject: Re: rjni

Mauricio Fern�ndez <batsman.geo@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<20040128183828.GA24920@student.ei.uni-stuttgart.de>...
> On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 02:59:54AM +0900, Phil Tomson wrote:
> > > 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?
> 
> The main slowdown comes from overloading. Simple methods can be
> dispatched at a rate of 30000/s or so on a 1700XP+ K7. However, once
> you get several methods with different signatures (but same name) this
> figure degrades quickly.
> 
> > 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
> 
> An extension _is_ always needed (I don't think I could wrap all of JNI
> only with Ruby/DL). What I meant is that in the current code base only
> a basic JNI wrapping is implemented in C, and everything else (method
> dispatching, parameter conversion, simulation of singletons,
> exceptions...) is written in Ruby using the extension.
> 
> [...] 
> 
> > 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.
> 
> <grain_of_salt>
> That's a possibility... surely way more gratifying than having to write
> some 10000-15000 lines of tedious, boring C code,

Can a tool like Swig help to automate the process?  I wouldn't want to
type in that much C code either.  Check out http://www.swig.org and
see if it will help you avoid all that coding.

Phil