I built YARV yesterday so that I could start playing with it. Building and installing it was easy, I just followed the directions on its home page. Testing also went pretty well (except for my last test) — the results were a bit more varied than I'd thought they'd be though. Here's what I saw.
I started out with my hokey little prime finder that I use as an example everywhere else. Here's the code
for num in 1..100_000 do
is_prime = 1
for x in 2..(num - 1) do
if (num % x == 0)
is_prime = x
break
end
end
if is_prime == 1
puts "#{num} is a prime number"
else
puts "#{num} equals #{is_prime} * #{num/is_prime}"
end
end
And here are the results:
$ time ruby primes.rb < /dev/null
real 3m12.391s
user 3m7.828s
sys 0m0.172s
$ time ~/bin/rubyyarv primes.rb < /dev/null
real 1m10.277s
user 1m7.008s
sys 0m0.084s
About a 3x speed up, pretty good stuff.
Then I whipped out a little recursive factorial function:
def fact(num)
if num == 1
num
else
num * fact(num - 1)
end
end
1000.times do
puts "500! is #{fact(500)}"
end
Which looked like this:
$ time ruby fact.rb > /dev/null
real 0m2.932s
user 0m2.792s
sys 0m0.008s
$ time ~/bin/rubyyarv fact.rb > /dev/null
real 0m2.230s
user 0m2.132s
sys 0m0.008s
Not nearly the speed up I'd thought I'd get. I'll have to profile it and see if I can figure out where the bottleneck is.
Then I decided to try my rwb test suite. Here's what it looked like:
$ ruby -Ilib test/test_rwb.rb
Loaded suite test/test_rwb
Started
....................................................
Finished in 0.024843 seconds.
52 tests, 95 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
$ ~/bin/rubyyarv -Ilib test/test_rwb.rb
Loaded suite test/test_rwb
Started
....................................................
Finished in 0.020679 seconds.
52 tests, 95 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
About a 20% speed-up here, not bad but not great either.
Finally, I threw the r43 test suite at it. This is where things broke down:
$ ruby -Ilib test/test_r43.rb
Loaded suite test/test_r43
Started
...............................................
...............................................
...........
Finished in 3.956994 seconds.
105 tests, 650 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
$ ~/bin/rubyyarv -Ilib test/test_r43b
Loaded suite test/test_r43
Started
....................EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE..EEEEE
................................................
......E
Finished in 0.671329 seconds.
[error messages deleted]
105 tests, 107 assertions, 0 failures, 27 errors
Either my install is broken, or there are other problems. Again, I'll have to take a longer look and see what I see. I'll try to post more about this tomorrow.
