From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2004-05-10T23:49:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Roundup of new RubyGems features

On Monday, May 10, 2004, 9:34:13 PM, Jim wrote:

> Charles Comstock wrote:
>> I was reading about how you did the executable by making a fake file to
>> load in others.  I never used rake without rubygems but I noticed it
>> definitely had a slow startup time.  Could this be related to that?
>> There is a definite noticeable pause between typing rake and getting the
>> first line of output, or even --help options.

> It is more likely that the cause of a slow rake startup is the time it
> takes to calculate any filelists used for dependency detection.  For
> example, the filelist used for the clean target searches your entire
> project tree looking for files that can be deleted.  An obvious 
> optimization would be to delay the creation of a filelist until we 
> really need it.

> If slow startups are a problem, I'll look into some possible fixes.

I've noticed this problem with rake for a long time, and it means I
don't use it for simple things (for which a slow startup is
unacceptable).  Putting file lists inside methods is one way to get
some cheap lazy evaluation I think...

Gavin