[MacRuby-devel] Does MacRuby Play Well with RVM?

[Mark Rada]

Not true.

For those of us that have a lot of gems, being able to use gemsets with MacRuby can yield significant speed ups when loading something that requires a gem. 

As a quick benchmark I chose to load the "abstract" gem because it is a single file weighing in at 75 lines (including comments and white space), then I tried loading it with varying numbers of other gems installed:

macruby -rubygems -e "start = Time.now; require 'abstract'; p Time.now - start"

0 other gems:   0.180205 seconds
1 other gem:     0.310673 seconds
10 other gems: 0.795038 seconds
23 other gems: 2.478057 seconds

23 gems seems odd, but that is how many other gems are installed when you install rails. If you have rails and then some other gems, the load time would be much worse because, as you can see, the performance degradation is _exponential_. This performance issue will eventually go away, but not any time soon.

For me, this is a "real" reason for using rvm, but this may not be the case for everyone. 


Mark Rada
mrada at marketcircle.com



On 2011-05-21, at 10:04 PM, Chris Rhoden wrote:

> The point of my email was:
> 
> Use RVM to install 1.9.2 or jRuby or whatever.
> 
> Install MacRuby from source or the package, and execute it using `macruby`, `macirb`, and the like. There is no reason to overload `ruby` to point at macruby, which is the only real benefit RVM gets you.
> 
> On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 8:09 PM, Mark Rada <mrada at marketcircle.com> wrote:
> I have been using rvm with MacRuby a while now, mostly for the use of gemsets. I have been able to switch between MacRuby 0.10 and the "nightly" builds without issue including several different gemsets for "nightly" builds.
> 
> However, there will be issues if you are developing with Xcode. But they are pretty easy to keep up with.
> 
> 1. Outside of an rvm enabled shell, the most recently installed version of MacRuby is the default.
> 
> 2. Similarly, using gems with an app will require you to install the gems using macgem explicitly (or setting your GEM_PATH to point to where rvm is storing stuff).
> 
> Sent from my iDevice
> 
> On 2011-05-20, at 18:18, Shannon Love <techzen at me.com> wrote:
> 
> > Last week I attempted to install RVM on my system so I could use various versions of Ruby including Macruby. I encountered problems including a reinstall of RVM that had incorrect permissions. However, it is quite possible that all the errors were the result of my naviety about the ruby environment so I'm willing to give it another go.
> >
> > Has anyone else used RVM with Macruby and does it work well? Can I safely run multiple versions of Macruby? Will it alter or contaminate the regular installed version?
> >
> > Any advice would be appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Shannon
> > _______________________________________________
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> > MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
> > http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
> 
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> 
> -- 
> chrisrhoden
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