Can't wait for someone to write a new faster better string class which handles strings of any length by internally chopping them into 23 character portions....
lol yes....... how reasonable. ahah when i saw the title of the article all i could think was "click comments to tune in for the most amusing flamewar this week" but so many of these comments are like "so... its 23 characters.... why not?!"
comeon peopleeeee, a bit of an arbitrary internal standard, no?
i understand the point about "CONCLUSION: it doesn't matter for a few strings!" but.... comeonnnn it must matter on some level, otherwise why is Rails such a pain in the ass to optimize? these things must add up...
It's not arbitrary. It is the length available when taking the space the String objects must have in order to be able to handle strings allocated on the heap.
And I could write books about why Rails is such a pain to optimize but this is not it: This is an optimisation over the generic case of allocating the buffer elsewhere. An optimisation you also happens to find in C++ implementations for example.
explain "3" in terms of your comp sci 101 divine computer law... Ok I get itttt "len/ptr/capa/shared". I've never written an interpreter so I can't rewrite the implementation myself, but I've worked with Rails enough to know that Ruby's is terribly inefficient, and these are problems created in it's abstraction from C, not inherent to C. Maybe this RString case is a minor issue, but it seems to me to lack some rigorousness, to be a performance leak. It's one of those things that makes you wonder "What Would Linus Do?". Although I do understand the points about including it AT ALL to be "free gain, little loss" and the language can't be C, but sometimes I don't know....
Just admit that maybe something is wrong here. Please. you'll be the first Rubyist ever, the dawn of a golden era. I've been intrigued more and more by the Lisp community because many of those devs seem to have a philosophical unwillingness to compromise performance and proper engineering, whereas in Ruby people get mad at you for not embracing the compromises!! Geez.
Hint: writing "Hint:" and then saying something really obvious that you learned from the article we all just read makes you sound craaaaaazy obnoxious
(Incidentally, it's issues like this that make me thank my lucky stars I do my web work on the JVM now.)
Haha, oh, I'm not a rubyist. Far from it; I'm a systems programmer. My ruby experience comes from writing add-ons for a hobbiest video game engine. I agree that ruby is often quite inefficient.
However, in this case, the number 23 comes from the amount of space that would be needed to store the smallest string in heap memory after taking into account malloc's bookkeeping info and whatnot.
As an aside, if you already knew the answer, why go on a rant that makes you seem ignorant?
I mean I understand the logic of optimizing for cases when you are going to be less than the lower-bound of data you can throw to the heap as you explain. I guess my question (I am honestly asking this one) is why not use the struct char array approach or some variant of it to optimize in the other direction as well (using 256 as the limit, for example, since it is closely associated with DB applications)? Is there a concern for wasted memory, or would it screw up their implementation of "union" or something? (I will, btw, willfully admit ignorance on some super in-depth C mechanics but I don't think it invalidates my point.)
I've heard of cases where Ruby performance supposedly increased tremendously because of raising some memory / garbage collection limits, and in today's world I always wondered why they don't try harder to make the sacrifice on memory footprint in order to gain speed. As a platform that is to this day routinely blasted for being so damn slow (I'm sure a lot of this falls on Rails' shoulders especially since ActiveRecord still was glacial when I stopped following... ~1.3 seconds of Ruby processing to render simple pages IIRC) why not start inserting some performance hacks or re-implementing with performance as top priority?
The answer to your question is that I'm sociopathic on the internet.
More to the point, ruby always uses string with more than 23 character. It's strings that are passed to the client and an HTML page is almost always bigger than 23 characters.
Ruby is a general purpose scripting language that can be used for web development (rails, sinatra) but is often used for different purposes (puppet, chef, vagrant, shoes, ...).
And even if you'd assume web development as the only purpose, there's a lot of strings that are shorter than 23 characters: Header for request and responses, form fields passed by the client (usernames, passwords, ...), field names passed in hashes, table and column names, template and file names, URLs or even the occasional, totally rare string in a json structure. It's an optimization with major gain and little loss.
Actually, my comment needs to be understood as an answer to the OP's title "Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters".
I understand that there's many places where strings are shorter than 23 characters and I never meant to say that this optimization was superfluous. I actually think it's pretty clever.