Converting some autogenerated ruby code to C

ruby-talk
#1

Couldn't you start with Ruby, see how it performs, and add C support
later? Or does it become more difficult later?

Just remember, not everyone has a C compiler on their system...

Regards,

Dan

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···

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Mahurin [mailto:eric.mahurin@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 3:26 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: converting some autogenerated ruby code to C

One of the next things I want to do in my grammar package is
to give it a performance boost by generating C code instead
of ruby code. Right now the parsers I generate are a set of a
few methods with giant expressions in each. I would like to
try improving the performance by generating and compiling C
code instead. My preference would be to convert my small
subset of ruby code to C code (easily have an option to use
pure ruby or use ruby/C), but I could also autogenerate C
code instead. Anybody have any opinions/ideas about what
approach I whould take?

#2

> One of the next things I want to do in my grammar package is
> to give it a performance boost by generating C code instead
> of ruby code. Right now the parsers I generate are a set of a
> few methods with giant expressions in each. I would like to
> try improving the performance by generating and compiling C
> code instead. My preference would be to convert my small
> subset of ruby code to C code (easily have an option to use
> pure ruby or use ruby/C), but I could also autogenerate C
> code instead. Anybody have any opinions/ideas about what
> approach I whould take?

Couldn't you start with Ruby, see how it performs, and add C support
later? Or does it become more difficult later?

I've already have a pure ruby solution. There are a couple reasons I
would like to have an alternate C solution:

* I'm not using regular expressions at the lowest level. The solution
I have has a superset of the functionality of regular expressions
(full parsing, works on more than just strings). I would rather not
move to use regular expressions just for the sake of performance. I
may still do it at some point, but it will add ugliness since I have
to buffer into a string. Instead, I would rather just get the same
advantage that regular expressions have - they are written in C. I'm
not sure if I would be able to quite get to the regex performance or
not. On one hand, I'm doing code generation/compiling and Regexp is
just putting the regex into a more manageable structure. On the other
hand, my solution is duck-typed and not tied to String, so I'll have
messaging overhead for each additional char/token/element read
(input.read1next) and checked (pattern.===).

* I would like to get this parsing on par with parsers from other
languages - YACC, ANTLR, etc. I would like to get some bragging
rights relative to these. Of course, when you add ruby actions
(blocks) in the parsing this could slow things down quite a bit, since
you're back into ruby instead of C.

Just remember, not everyone has a C compiler on their system...

That's why I'll provide a pure ruby and a ruby/C solution.

Anybody want to point me to some examples/docs of ruby2c, rb2c, etc?

···

On 7/27/06, Berger, Daniel <Daniel.Berger@qwest.com> wrote:

#3

why not just use ruby-inline? it's probably the easiest way to generate c
from ruby.

-a

···

On Sat, 29 Jul 2006, Eric Mahurin wrote:

That's why I'll provide a pure ruby and a ruby/C solution.

Anybody want to point me to some examples/docs of ruby2c, rb2c, etc?

--
we can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with
ourselves.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama

#4

> That's why I'll provide a pure ruby and a ruby/C solution.
>
> Anybody want to point me to some examples/docs of ruby2c, rb2c, etc?

why not just use ruby-inline? it's probably the easiest way to generate c
from ruby.

well, Ruby2C generates C from Ruby .. RubyInline lets you put some C
in your Ruby.

···

On 7/28/06, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov <ara.t.howard@noaa.gov> wrote:

On Sat, 29 Jul 2006, Eric Mahurin wrote:

-a
--
we can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with
ourselves.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama

--
thanks,
-pate
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