Ruby 2.0.0 in Detail

http://globaldev.co.uk/2013/03/ruby-2-0-0-in-detail/

by timblair • 13 years ago

63 15 13 years ago

globaldev.co.uk

Justsignedup• 13 years ago

Why was Array#bsearch and Range#bsearch not part of ruby stdlib for 20 years?

No, really. I want to know this one. It's almost like we want to encourage people writing slow code...

stephenhuey• 13 years ago

Maybe because some friendly contributor such as yourself hadn't added it yet! I have no idea, really, but apparently the Ruby index method drops down to C so it's fairly fast:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7436155/rubyindex-method-...

That being said, binary search is a welcome addition.

ajanuary2• 13 years ago

I did a quick [1] google around some of the most popular programming languages to see if their stdlibs had binary search:

Python: No Perl: No PHP: No Lua: No Java: Yes .NET: Yes Objective-C: Yes

Of course your point then becomes "Why haven't Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP and Lua added binary search".

[1] So it may be wrong. Please correct me if I am.

Hinrik• 13 years ago

For Lua at least, it's not surprising. Its standard library is deliberately extremely minimal. There are no functions to search tables (Lua's datastructure for collections), not even linearly.

rraval• 13 years ago

Python: http://docs.python.org/2/library/bisect.html

pmahoney• 13 years ago

Part of it must be that binary search only works on a sorted array, and most arrays won't be sorted.

Followup question: are there other common array operations that only work on arrays in a particular state? Are any of these in or out of various standard libraries?

A long time ago... I implemented a wrapper around the Gnu Scientific Library matrix operations. I recall trying to be clever by mixing in some extra methods only after getting the LU decomposition (these extra methods required the matrix to be in a specific state). A little too dynamic for my current tastes. It's not a terrible idea perhaps, but this sort of thing tends to kill performance.

kylebgorman2• 13 years ago

Python has the stdlib module "bisect" which does binary search.

alexvay• 13 years ago

The colors of the site are _terrible_ on the eyes!

ajanuary2• 13 years ago

It also uses -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; which means you can't zoom in to make the text bigger (I've emailed them about this)

timblair• 13 years ago

Fixed. Sorry about that.

VeejayRampay• 13 years ago

Awesome write-up, thanks for putting the work in for everyone.

Looks like a solid release.

moron4hire• 13 years ago

Refinements look exactly like C# Extension Methods.

Ruby 2.0.0 in Detail

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