FastRI 0.1.1 (fast+smart ri docs searching): configurable se

tulkas · November 10, 2006, 12:31pm

FastRI is an alternative to the ri command-line tool. It is much
faster, and
also allows you to offer RI lookup services over DRb. FastRI is smarter
than
ri, and can find classes anywhere in the hierarchy without specifying
the
“full path”. Its RubyGems support is better than ri’s, and it knows
which gem
a method/class definition came from.

Getting it

Additional information, tarballs… at
eigenclass.org

FastRI can be installed with RubyGems:
gem install fastri
(if you get an old version/a 404 error, please allow some time after the
release until the package propagates to the RubyForge mirrors). Please
read
below for an important note regarding the RubyGems packages.

Release information and change summary:
eigenclass.org

Usage

There are two parts to FastRI:

the server: fastri-server
the client: fri

FastRI uses a Rinda Ring to allow servers to be discovered automatically
without needing to indicate the DRb URIs manually. It can work across
machines if you make sure the ring server is bound to the correct
interface,
and the ACL permissions are correct.

Examples

$ fastri-server (creates the index on the first run, blocks)

Later, (times measured with a cold cache):
$ time ruby bin/fri -f plain Array#fetch

Array#fetch
array.fetch(index) → obj
[…]
real 0m0.287s (real 0m0.127s with a hot cache)
user 0m0.048s
sys 0m0.008s

Compare to:
$ time ri -T -f plain Array#fetch

Array#fetch
[…]
real 0m10.136s (real ~ 1.5s with a hot cache)
user 0m1.140s
sys 0m0.464s

This illustrates FastRI’s ability to locate classes deep in the class
hierarchy:

$ fri Base
------------------------------------------------------ Multiple
choices:

  ActionMailer::Base, ActionView::Base, ActionWebService::API::Base,
  ActionWebService::Base, ActionWebService::Client::Base,
  ActiveRecord::Base, MapReduce::ActiveRecord::Base,
  RSS::Maker::Base, Scruffy::Components::Base,
  Scruffy::Formatters::Base, Scruffy::Layers::Base,
  Scruffy::Renderers::Base, Scruffy::Themes::Base

$ fri Themes::Base
------------------------------------------- Class:
Scruffy::Themes::Base
Scruffy::Themes::Base
Author: Brasten S.

  Date:   August 14th, 2006

Compare to
$ ri Themes::Base … several seconds later …
Nothing known about Themes::Base

A small note about RubyGems + FastRI.

RubyGems adds a noticeable overhead to fri, making it run slower than if
you
installed it directly from the tarball with setup.rb.

Compare the execution time when installed with RubyGems:
$ time fri -f plain String > /dev/null

real 0m0.385s
user 0m0.244s
sys 0m0.036s

to the time fri actually takes to run, without the overhead introduced
by
RubyGems:
$ time ruby bin/fri -f plain String > /dev/null

real 0m0.088s
user 0m0.040s
sys 0m0.008s

If you care about those extra 300ms (and there are situations where they
will
matter, e.g. when using fri for method completion), get FastRI from the
tarballs.

License

FastRI is licensed under the same terms as Ruby. See LICENSE.

Feedback

Bug reports, patches, comments… are appreciated.
You can contact the author via [email protected]. Please add “fastri” to the
subject in order to bypass the spam filters.

tulkas · November 10, 2006, 1:52pm

Mauricio F. wrote:

FastRI is an alternative to the ri command-line tool. It is much faster, and
also allows you to offer RI lookup services over DRb. FastRI is smarter than
ri, and can find classes anywhere in the hierarchy without specifying the
“full path”. Its RubyGems support is better than ri’s, and it knows which gem
a method/class definition came from.

Excellent work. Works perfectly on my osx box.
Though, standard ri goes in to ‘less’ mode, I kinda got used to that.
Could it be possible that with some ~/.fastri configuration file I
could control if I want to pass it though ‘less -R’ ? (I’m assuming
not everyone wants it as a default.)

Now to alias ri to fri and somehow make it fallback if the server
isn’t running =)

tulkas · November 11, 2006, 12:13am

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 09:51:48PM +0900, Mikko L. wrote:

could control if I want to pass it though ‘less -R’ ? (I’m assuming
not everyone wants it as a default.)

Sure, I’ll implement it; it will probably be in 0.2.0. I always hated
that
about ri though, so I think it’ll default to pager-less mode

Now to alias ri to fri and somehow make it fallback if the server
isn’t running =)

Jonas P. has done some work towards making fri launch the server
(which
would run as a daemon). We’re not there yet, but I’ve created a branch
for
that at eigenclass.org (hint: help
appreciated

The bin/fastri-server you’ll find there honors a -d option to run in the
background. This works already, using the ‘daemons’ gem, but it’d be
best if
we could get rid of that dependency (a reasonable #daemonize should take
a
dozen lines). bin/fri already tries to start the server when it cannot
be
found, but this is not working yet (did I say that patches are
appreciated? :).
Another pending issue is win32 compatibility: would it be possible to
write
something equivalent to #daemonize without fork()?

tulkas · November 11, 2006, 12:19am