Did you hear the exciting news? JRuby 1.1 is out! For real, you can call your grandma with the great news. :party: Wow, that was quick.

Okay, so the big new thing in JRuby is a bytecode compiler. As you may know, up to 1.0 it was just a Ruby interpreter in Java. Now you can actually compile Ruby modules to Java classes and no one will know the difference, very devious. :cool: Sounds like Robin Hood in a way, doesn't it?

The JRuby guys are claiming that this makes JRuby on par with "regular Ruby" on performance, if not better. Hmm. Just to be on the safe side, what size shoes do you wear? Oh ouch, those are going to be tricky to fit in your mouth. :/ And Freud will say you're stuck in the oral stage. Too much? Okay.

So here is my completely unvetted, dirty, real world test. No laboratory conditions here, you're in the ghetto. First we need something *to* test. I don't have a great deal of Ruby code at my disposal, but this should do the trick. How does scanning the raw filesystem for urls sound? The old harvest script actually does a half decent job of turning up a bunch of findings.

Now introducing the contenders. First up, his name is JRuby, you know him from occasional mentions on obscure blogs and the programming reddit past the top 500 entries. He promises to free all Java slaves by giving away free Rubies to everyone!

Aaand the incumbent, the famous... Ruby! You know him, your parents know him, every family would adopt him as their own child if they could. He's the destroyer of kingdoms and the creator of empires, he's bigger than Moses himself!

Our two drivers will be racing across a hostile territory. Your track is a 25gb ext3 live file system. During this time, I can promise you that only Firefox is likely to be writing new urls to disk, but I could be lying eheheh. Due to the unpredictable nature of this rally track, regulations allow only one racer at a time, but you will be clocked.

First up is the new kid on the block Jay....Ruby. The Ruby code will not be compiled before execution, we'll let the just-in-time compiler do its thing.

$ time ( sudo cat /dev/sda5 | bin/jruby harvest.rb --url > /tmp/fsurls.jruby )
real 39m26.547s
user 37m19.072s
sys 1m28.406s

Not too shabby for a first run, but since this a brand new venue, we have no frame of reference yet. Let's see how Ruby will do here.

$ time ( sudo cat /dev/sda5 | harvest.rb --url > /tmp/fsurls.ruby )
real 78m42.186s
user 62m12.537s
sys 2m18.721s

Well, look at that! The new kid is pretty slick, isn't he? Sure is giving the old man a run for his money. Let's see how they answered the questions.

$ lh
-rw-r--r-- 1 alex alex 86M 2008-04-21 18:29 fsurls.jruby
-rw-r--r-- 1 alex alex 8.6G 2008-04-21 20:58 fsurls.ruby

Yowza! No less than a hundred times more matches with Ruby. What is going on here? Did Jay just race to the finish line, dropping the vast majority of his parcels? Or did father Ruby see double and triple and quadruple, ending up with lots and lots of duplicates? Well, we don't really *know* how many urls exist in those 25gb of data, but it seems a little bit suspect that there would be in excess of 8gb of them.

One way or the other, it's pretty clear that the regular expression semantics are not entirely identical. In fact, you might be sweating a little right now if your code uses them heavily.

UPDATE: Squashing duplicates in both files actually produces two files of very similar size (13mb), in which the disparity of unique entries is only a very reasonable 4% (considering the file system was being written to in the process). The question still remains how did Ruby produce 8gb of output.