Re: Ruby 1.9 compatibility and performance

On May 17, 2008, at 11:05 PM, Ryan Davis wrote:

> On May 15, 2008, at 11:16 , DJ Cole wrote:
>
>> 2) Performance - at least, a few modules, like the default REXML  
>> parser.
>> This thing took about 10 minutes to parse a simple 2 MB file just  
>> once.
>> It's unusable. I had to switch to libxml. Is this a Ruby artifact  
>> (e.g.
>> fundamentals like regular expressions just aren't up to snuff) or  
>> just a
>> bad module?
>
> It is certainly slow and bloated if you do a full parse. If you  
> switch to streaming it can be quite fast. Some of my students  
> insisted on using it to parse my itunes xml db (7.9Mb) and actually  
> got fairly good/usable times (not good enough to beat my regex  
> version--but good enough to use).

Interesting.  Can you talk a little about why you prefer using regexen  
to a parser in this instance?

I'm not trying to question your decision.  I'm just curious about your  
reasoning here.

James Edward Gray II