Which project should I work on?

ruby-talk
1

I was wondering on any feedback on which of the following pet projects
would be most helpful to the community.

1) create [another] ruby JIT
There are some ideas that could speed up the tired old VM [and the new
VM]. Speed is good, right?

2) Documentation: hack on rdoc with a few things -- some bugs, update
the hanna template so that it looks prettier, create a live method
introspection gem, add remote ri gem, etc.

3) hack on the KRI GC. I think I might be able to run the sweep phase
in a separate thread, thus speeding up GC.

4) create a ruby tutorial gem, which supplements the RI information for
core class by adding tutorials to them [yea!]. It would be wiki
editable and every so often the wiki content snurfed up and packaged
into a gem with only documentation in it [no real code]. That's the
initial thought anyway.

5) create gem plugin to add pre-install hooks [ex: "apt-get install
some_dependency"]

6) create an "optimized" edition of Ruby--i.e. an REE but for 1.9 [so
tcmalloc, tuned GC to start, GCC profile optimized, etc.]

7) try to crack down and kill some of the outstanding bugs in the core.

8) try to update mod_rails to allow for "per virtualhost"
PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp

9) a ruby optimizing pre processor
converts things like
def go
  if a == '3'
  end
end

to

@_3 = '3'
def go
if a == @_3
end
end

Thus avoiding extra allocations [also an optimized erb].

10) try to optimize rails [is there much possible there though?]

So anyway feel free to vote on your favorite [+1 it] and say why. I
don't want to work on something that people don't feel is important :slight_smile:

Here's my own:
+1 for number 1. It might be useful across ruby implementations, and
would make ruby look better in synthetic benchmarks.

Thanks.

=r

···

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2

Thanks for this opportunity: I always wanted to try out how good
Doodle works. I took the liberty to set up a doodle at

Happy voting!

Kind regards

robert

···

2009/7/10 Roger Pack <rogerpack2005@gmail.com>:

I was wondering on any feedback on which of the following pet projects
would be most helpful to the community.

Here's my own:
+1 for number 1. It might be useful across ruby implementations, and
would make ruby look better in synthetic benchmarks.

--
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/

3

huh, a toughy, but I'd vote +1 for

7) try to crack down and kill some of the outstanding bugs in the core

killing bugs is never a bad idea after all :wink:

Greetz

4

Roger Pack wrote:

9) a ruby optimizing pre processor
converts things like
def go
  if a == '3'
  end
end

to

@_3 = '3'
def go
if a == @_3
end
end

Is that really faster? Even so, what is the effect of many such conversions (hence many ivars) on ivar lookup time and on object size?

···

--
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407

5

Roger Pack wrote:

4) create a ruby tutorial gem, which supplements the RI information for
core class by adding tutorials to them [yea!]. It would be wiki
editable and every so often the wiki content snurfed up and packaged
into a gem with only documentation in it [no real code]. That's the
initial thought anyway.

+1
That's very useful for newcommers to Ruby and those who don't want to
write the same things again and again.

Marvin

···

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6

I was wondering on any feedback on which of the following pet projects
would be most helpful to the community.

I can only speak for myself...

1) create [another] ruby JIT
There are some ideas that could speed up the tired old VM [and the new
VM]. Speed is good, right?

I'd say, hack on one of the existing ones. Or, if you can, make Rubinius as
fast as (or faster than) MRI. Hey, shoot the moon!

3) hack on the KRI GC. I think I might be able to run the sweep phase
in a separate thread, thus speeding up GC.

So, I'd file that with #1.

4) create a ruby tutorial gem, which supplements the RI information for
core class by adding tutorials to them [yea!]. It would be wiki
editable and every so often the wiki content snurfed up and packaged
into a gem with only documentation in it [no real code]. That's the
initial thought anyway.

Hmm. Would this be something that could be combined with a Try Ruby style
tutorial? (tryruby.hobix.net)

5) create gem plugin to add pre-install hooks [ex: "apt-get install
some_dependency"]

Pre-install hooks? Maybe, though I'd be wary. I like being able to install a
gem just to read the rdocs.

And that sounds like a TERRIBLE way to do what you're trying to do, by the
way. I know gems doesn't already do this, but what about reverse dependencies?
What about portability?

Find me an example of a pre-installation script that isn't better done some
other way.

6) create an "optimized" edition of Ruby--i.e. an REE but for 1.9 [so
tcmalloc, tuned GC to start, GCC profile optimized, etc.]

This, I'd love to see. REE meaning Ruby Enterprise Edition, right?

+1 here.

7) try to crack down and kill some of the outstanding bugs in the core.

Always a good idea, but I'm guessing there are people on that. Anyone doing a
Ruby Enterprise Edition for 1.9?

9) a ruby optimizing pre processor
converts things like
def go
  if a == '3'
  end
end

to

@_3 = '3'
def go
if a == @_3
end
end

I'd do that in the VM, if you can. Especially seeing as there's no way to tell
if your example is universally faster -- it necessarily adds an instance
variable. A particularly intelligent optimization might notice that this
string is only ever used for the one comparison, so as long as String isn't
messed with, it could be converted into code like the following C:

if (a[0] == '3' && a[1] == NULL)

I'm assuming C strings, Ruby strings might work differently, but you get the
idea.

10) try to optimize rails [is there much possible there though?]

Yes! Happening as part of merging with Merb, I thought. I'd love to see
progress there, though...

···

On Friday 10 July 2009 09:10:57 am Roger Pack wrote:

7

+1 :slight_smile: This more than anything else would aid all Ruby implementations
on all platforms. But it's obviously a large task. I'd say any help
you can provide Rails folks on moving toward a 3.0 that runs faster,
uses less memory, makes better use of threads, and opens the door to
platform integration (like ActiveORM could wrap Hibernate or JPA), the
better. That's what I'm going to be looking into.

- Charlie

···

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Roger Pack<rogerpack2005@gmail.com> wrote:

10) try to optimize rails [is there much possible there though?]

8

At the moment there is still no (rdoc) documentation for Ruby 1.9.1
available anywhere, so it would be great if that could be improved.

Björn

···

On Jul 10, 4:10 pm, Roger Pack <rogerpack2...@gmail.com> wrote:

2) Documentation: hack on rdoc with a few things -- some bugs, update
the hanna template so that it looks prettier, create a live method
introspection gem, add remote ri gem, etc.

9

Create a package like pythons multiprocessing to make multi -process code
easier in ruby and also to unify the programming model between windows and
unix variants.

10

All righty the results are in.

You said:

YARJIT [Yet Another Ruby JIT]
4

Documentation enhancements:
10

KRI GC improvements:
5

Tutorial gem:
6

pre-install gem hooks:
1 [yea!]

REE for 1.9
6

Try to crack down on core bugs:
10

update mod_rails
1

ruby optimized pre-processor
2

try to optimize rails
3

So the winners are Documentation and core bugs. Both already have
maintainers but I'll see what I can do.

Current plan for documentation:
create #desc methods for classes and methods [i.e. "String.desc,
String.desc_method :strip"] [1]
update Hanna template to be more space friendly
try to see if I can fix some odd ambiguities in the ruby core docs

Would remote ri be useful to anyone?

Current plan for core bugs:
  Are there any outstanding that people would have me work on? Any
RCR's you'd like me to submit to core? I'm currently not annoyed too bad
by any bugs, but if there are some I could give them a whack.

Thanks for the input.

[1] http://github.com/rogerdpack/desc_methods/tree/master though it's
not perfect yet

···

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11

Roger Pack wrote:
I was wondering on any feedback on which of the following pet projects
would be most helpful to the community.

11) One thing I would really, really like would be support for proxies
which require authentication, and more specifically the Microsoft ISA
Firewall. I'd like to be able to push to gemcutter from behind that
firewall, for instance, or install gems without resorting to NTLM APS

Barring that, Track down more bugs in the core!

And thanks for everything you've done so far.

···

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12

Joel VanderWerf wrote:

Roger Pack wrote:

def go
if a == @_3
end
end

Is that really faster? Even so, what is the effect of many such
conversions (hence many ivars) on ivar lookup time and on object size?

def go; '3'; end
Benchmark.realtime { 1000000.times { go }}

=> 0.40625

@_3 = '3'.freeze
def go2; @_3; end
Benchmark.realtime { 1000000.times { go2 }}

=> 0.359375

So...just barely [plus saving on the GC a bit].

Also if anybody wants to vote for it, could hack on the redcar editor or
arcadia in the *hopes* of someday creating an editor equal to the great
TextMate [except free, open source, and cross platform] :slight_smile:

Just +1 it here :slight_smile:

=r

···

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13

I'd say, hack on one of the existing ones. Or, if you can, make Rubinius
as
fast as (or faster than) MRI. Hey, shoot the moon!

Yeah it would be a hack to make ruby2cext better [already existing, for
MRI].

This, I'd love to see. REE meaning Ruby Enterprise Edition, right?

Yep.

if (a[0] == '3' && a[1] == NULL)

I'm assuming C strings, Ruby strings might work differently, but you get
the
idea.

That's a great idea. Avoid ruby calls totally :slight_smile: [NB that ruby2cext
already does this for a few things, so...maybe I can just use that].

10) try to optimize rails [is there much possible there though?]

Yes! Happening as part of merging with Merb, I thought. I'd love to see
progress there, though...

Thankfully not many people voted on that one since I didn't want to
really do it anyway :slight_smile:

=r

···

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14

Create a package like pythons multiprocessing to make multi -process
code
easier in ruby and also to unify the programming model between windows
and
unix variants.

A great suggestion.

Any +1's for it?

I had considered something like it but forgot about it. My first
thought was to wrap the apache runtime calls so that forked processes
could have shared mutexes, shared memory, etc.

However I couldn't think of...how it would actually be useful in day to
day--would it be? In what circumstances? (just wondering)

Also, can windows actually do something like
a = 3
Thread.new { # other process }
b = 3

? like shared startup state? huh? is that even possible? (just thinking
about how Python's multi process does things--it seems to allow for
something like that and I'm not sure how).

A search for process gems [1] seems to reveal a few that make forking
more convenient, and I've used them before. Would more convenience be
useful, is the question.

?

=r

[1]
http://allgems.ruby-forum.com/gems?search=fork
and
http://allgems.ruby-forum.com/gems?search=process
there are some shared memory gems, it appears, as well
http://allgems.ruby-forum.com/gems?search=memory
google "ruby mmap" and

···

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15

Dominic Sisneros wrote:

Create a package like pythons multiprocessing to make multi -process
code
easier in ruby and also to unify the programming model between windows
and
unix variants.

I am quite interested in multiprocessings

"A manager object returned by Manager() controls a server process which
holds Python objects and allows other processes to manipulate them using
proxies."

I envision refitting drb so that you can do something like
global_store = SharedHash.new

global_store[:shared_var] = 3
global_store[:shared_var2] = 3

Process.fork {
  proxy = global_store[:shared_var] # drb proxy object to the '3' in the
main class
  proxy.to_s # proxy method call with marshalling, etc.
}

i.e. a multi-process friendly wrapper for drb to make it "easy to use
among forked children"

I think this would allow for cross process mutexes
(global_store[:mutex1] = Mutex.new; global_store[:mutex1].synchronize {}
)

Thoughts? Would this be useful to anyone?
=r

···

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16

ok, i just got hit by this one:

    make all gems/libs run in ruby1.9

···

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Roger Pack<rogerpack2005@gmail.com> wrote:

All righty the results are in.

17

2) Documentation: hack on rdoc with a few things -- some bugs, update
the hanna template so that it looks prettier, create a live method
introspection gem, add remote ri gem, etc.

At the moment there is still no (rdoc) documentation for Ruby 1.9.1
available anywhere, so it would be great if that could be improved.

http://rubydoc.ruby-forum.com/doc/ruby-1.9.1-p129/

Are there any other requests for ruby documentation that people out
there still feel is lacking, anywhere?

-r

···

--
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18

11) One thing I would really, really like would be support for proxies
which require authentication, and more specifically the Microsoft ISA
Firewall. I'd like to be able to push to gemcutter from behind that
firewall, for instance, or install gems without resorting to NTLM APS

Any +1's out there? :slight_smile:

-r

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

19

11) One thing I would really, really like would be support for proxies
which require authentication, and more specifically the Microsoft ISA
Firewall. I'd like to be able to push to gemcutter from behind that
firewall, for instance, or install gems without resorting to NTLM APS

I did notice

with regard to NTLM

But since I don't have one to test with...

···

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20

+1
and make them 1.9 ready, pls :wink:

···

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 12:36 AM, Roger Pack<rogerpack2005@gmail.com> wrote:

Also if anybody wants to vote for it, could hack on the redcar editor or
arcadia in the *hopes* of someday creating an editor