On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 8:53 AM, Charles Hixson
<[email protected]> wrote:
> FWIW, I would prefer to be using a faster language, but I also prefer a
> language that's rapid to develop in.  And "premature optimization" is a
> problem that is endemic to programmers that are concerned about execution
> speed.

+2

> Quite often what you really need is a better algorithm.  (But it
> sure is nice to be able to tell is some choice is going to really slow
> things down.

But that statement often needs to be taken with a large grain of salt
since often you cannot make a general statement about performance of a
particular piece of code which always applies without the context.
Measuring is the most reliable and fastest way to know.

>  I will often write special case pattern processors rather than
> using regular expressions because of this.

What patterns did you process?  Can you give more detail?  I am curios
because usually regular expressions are faster.

>  It may not be true any longer,
> but at one point I timed one of my problems, and special case code in ruby
> was considerably more than 50 times faster than using a regular expression.
> That was years ago, and as I said it may not be true any longer.  But I tend
> to presume that it's still true, and the only way to  really be sure is to
> run exhaustive timing tests after every library or compiler change.

You are comparing apples with oranges here: MRI has changed
dramatically from 1.8 to 1.9 and so did the regexp engine.  I may be
the regexp engine internals which make a difference now or a badly
crafted regexp.  Without knowing more about your code your statement
is basically meaningless to us.

Kind regards

robert

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

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