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0 pointsfat0wl12y ago0 comments

lol yes....... how reasonable. ahah when i saw the title of the article all i could think was "click comments to tune in for the most amusing flamewar this week" but so many of these comments are like "so... its 23 characters.... why not?!"

comeon peopleeeee, a bit of an arbitrary internal standard, no?

i understand the point about "CONCLUSION: it doesn't matter for a few strings!" but.... comeonnnn it must matter on some level, otherwise why is Rails such a pain in the ass to optimize? these things must add up...

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vidarh12y ago

It's not arbitrary. It is the length available when taking the space the String objects must have in order to be able to handle strings allocated on the heap.

And I could write books about why Rails is such a pain to optimize but this is not it: This is an optimisation over the generic case of allocating the buffer elsewhere. An optimisation you also happens to find in C++ implementations for example.

EpicEng12y ago

What non-arbitrary "small string" length would you chose?

Btw, the fact that you don't understand it doesn't make it arbitrary. Hint: it's not arbitrary at all.

fat0wlOP12y ago

seriously... this?

#define RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MAX ((int)((sizeof(VALUE)*3)/sizeof(char)-1))

explain "3" in terms of your comp sci 101 divine computer law... Ok I get itttt "len/ptr/capa/shared". I've never written an interpreter so I can't rewrite the implementation myself, but I've worked with Rails enough to know that Ruby's is terribly inefficient, and these are problems created in it's abstraction from C, not inherent to C. Maybe this RString case is a minor issue, but it seems to me to lack some rigorousness, to be a performance leak. It's one of those things that makes you wonder "What Would Linus Do?". Although I do understand the points about including it AT ALL to be "free gain, little loss" and the language can't be C, but sometimes I don't know....

Just admit that maybe something is wrong here. Please. you'll be the first Rubyist ever, the dawn of a golden era. I've been intrigued more and more by the Lisp community because many of those devs seem to have a philosophical unwillingness to compromise performance and proper engineering, whereas in Ruby people get mad at you for not embracing the compromises!! Geez.

Hint: writing "Hint:" and then saying something really obvious that you learned from the article we all just read makes you sound craaaaaazy obnoxious

(Incidentally, it's issues like this that make me thank my lucky stars I do my web work on the JVM now.)

EpicEng12y ago

Haha, oh, I'm not a rubyist. Far from it; I'm a systems programmer. My ruby experience comes from writing add-ons for a hobbiest video game engine. I agree that ruby is often quite inefficient.

However, in this case, the number 23 comes from the amount of space that would be needed to store the smallest string in heap memory after taking into account malloc's bookkeeping info and whatnot.

As an aside, if you already knew the answer, why go on a rant that makes you seem ignorant?

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vidarh12y ago

It's not arbitrary. It is the length available when taking the space the String objects must have in order to be able to handle strings allocated on the heap.

EpicEng12y ago

What non-arbitrary "small string" length would you chose?

Btw, the fact that you don't understand it doesn't make it arbitrary. Hint: it's not arbitrary at all.

fat0wlOP12y ago

seriously... this?

#define RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MAX ((int)((sizeof(VALUE)*3)/sizeof(char)-1))

Hint: writing "Hint:" and then saying something really obvious that you learned from the article we all just read makes you sound craaaaaazy obnoxious

(Incidentally, it's issues like this that make me thank my lucky stars I do my web work on the JVM now.)

EpicEng12y ago

Haha, oh, I'm not a rubyist. Far from it; I'm a systems programmer. My ruby experience comes from writing add-ons for a hobbiest video game engine. I agree that ruby is often quite inefficient.

However, in this case, the number 23 comes from the amount of space that would be needed to store the smallest string in heap memory after taking into account malloc's bookkeeping info and whatnot.

As an aside, if you already knew the answer, why go on a rant that makes you seem ignorant?

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse