[MacRuby-devel] Proposal: splitting macrubyc UI from logic

[Mark Rada]

On 2011-03-14, at 16:05, Laurent Sansonetti <lsansonetti at apple.com> wrote:

> Hi Mark,
> 
> As macrubyc's compilation logic is essentially spawning several command-line tools, I wonder if calling the logic directly from macruby_deploy is going to bring significant advantages, vs the complexity of splitting macrubyc.
> 

The splitting macrubyc was a low hanging fruit; macrubyc was almost split already, so few changes were introduced. I don't think I introduced much complexity, and in turn some clutter was separated from the initialization process:

- calls to #die were replaced with calls to #raise
- the option parser was moved out of the compiler class, now Compiler#initialize takes a hash of options and just unpacks it
- most of the extra tool lookups (#locate) were moved to constants so they only have to be looked up once

> I think a better strategy would be to optimize what's slow in macrubyc (such as command-line options parsing),

I don't think it's the command line parsing, I thinks it's the spawning of new MacRuby processes which will have to JIT the compiler logic over and over again for each file. 

But I guess a lot of that can be mitigated by compiling the compiler when it becomes possible. 

> and better include the compilation strategy into Xcode (if possible).
> 

That does sound like a much better idea for macruby_deploy. 

However, I am rarely using Xcode to work with MacRuby, and there are other places where calling the compiler directly will have benefit, such as a rake task or during gem installation. Perhaps I am speaking for a minority in these two cases

Sent from my iDevice

> Laurent
> 
> On Mar 12, 2011, at 5:40 PM, Mark Rada wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I have completed a proof of concept patch for MacRuby where I have split the UI of macrubyc from the underlying logic so that tools like macruby_deploy can make use of the compiler without having to spawn a new macruby process for each file that needs to be compiled. This should also be beneficial for compiling gems and the standard library.
>> 
>> After having made this patch, I realized that there are still several places in the compiler where a new process is spawned to perform part of the compilation. I'm not really sure how much else can be lib-ified from the other required components. Overall there are still a few places that I know I can optimize without much work needed.
>> 
>> Right now, compile time for ruby files with about 100-200 lines of code is about 1(+/-0.1) seconds on my MBP. Spawning a new macruby process and processing the macrubyc options takes about 0.25 seconds; so I think the patch is still useful in the general case.
>> 
>> The code for the changes is located in my MacRuby fork on github: https://github.com/ferrous26/MacRuby/tree/libify-rubyc
>> 
>> Mark Rada
>> mrada at marketcircle.com
>> 
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> 
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