Robot Has No Heart

Xavier Shay blogs here

A robot that does not have a heart

Benchmarks for creating a new array

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require 'benchmark'

n = 1000
m = 50000
blank = [0] * m
Benchmark.bm(7) do |x|
  x.report(".new with block:") { (0..n).collect { Array.new(m) { 0 } }}
  x.report("  .new no block:") { (0..n).collect { Array.new(m, 0) }}
  x.report("        [0] * x:") { (0..n).collect { [0] * m }}
  x.report("           #dup:") { (0..n).collect { blank.dup }}
end

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$ ruby19 benchmark.rb 
             user     system      total        real
.new with block: 10.180000   0.210000  10.390000 ( 10.459538)
  .new no block:  3.690000   0.210000   3.900000 (  3.915348)
        [0] * x:  4.280000   0.210000   4.490000 (  4.505334)
           #dup:  0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000491)

Know your constructors! What is #dup doing? I think it’s cheating.

Comparing lambdas in ruby

to_ruby is a really convenient way to compare the equality of two lambdas. It’s a bit slow though. If we get our hands dirty (only a little!) with ParseTree, we can get a result 2 orders of magnitude quicker. I’d be interested to see if these benchmarks differ significantly on other versions of ruby.

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~ $ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-23 patchlevel 110) [i686-darwin8.11.1]

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require 'benchmark'
require 'parse_tree'
require 'ruby2ruby'

def gen_lambda
  lambda {|x| x + 1 }
end

Parser = ParseTree.new(false)

# This only requires parse tree, not ruby2ruby
def proc_identity(block)
  klass = Class.new
  name = "myproc"
  klass.send(:define_method, name, &block)

  # .last ignores the method name and definition - they're irrelevant
  Parser.parse_tree_for_method(klass, name).last 
end

n = 1000
Benchmark.bmbm do |x|
  x.report("#to_ruby") { n.times { gen_lambda.to_ruby == gen_lambda.to_ruby }}
  x.report("#to_sexp") { n.times { gen_lambda.to_sexp == gen_lambda.to_sexp }}
  x.report("manual")   { n.times { proc_identity(gen_lambda) == proc_identity(gen_lambda) }}
end

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               user     system      total        real
#to_ruby   4.460000   0.220000   4.680000 (  4.695327)
#to_sexp   0.920000   0.190000   1.110000 (  1.110214)
manual     0.030000   0.000000   0.030000 (  0.032768)

In case you were wondering, I was playing around with this while implementing unique data generation for dm-sweatshop

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