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”. FastRI can perform full-text searching. 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.
User-visible changes since version 0.2.0
- fri will use a pager in full-text search mode, and also when asked to
(-P, -T, --[no-]pager, --pager-cmd) - multiple queries supported: fri upcase downcase
- fri -S is 100ms faster since it avoids requiring rubygems.rb
- list all classes/modules and methods with --classes and --methods, and
both
with --list-names (-l)
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.
