[Rubygems-developers] gem file lists

[Eric Hodel]

On Jul 23, 2008, at 03:17 AM, James Tucker wrote:
> Quite some time ago I wrote a blog post about the number of  
> temporary strings that are loaded when rubygems starts up. (The  
> largest culprit is the file list for the gems).
>
> I've been trying to think how to overcome this for some time,  
> without breaking the gems api, but a slightly more lightweight idea  
> came to me today, which may be workable prior to an architecture  
> change.
>
> Add another field for 'non-runtime files', for covering docs,  
> examples, rakefiles, tests, etc.
>
> This would enable gem authors to maintain the ability to scan the  
> gemspec for important files (often under lib/), but unimportant  
> files would be missed out.
>
> Initial saving on a development machine (averaging what we use in  
> the office), would seem to be around 30-40% of the instanced objects  
> in a `ruby -rubygems -e ""`
>
> On a related note, I was considering a more architectural changeset  
> to gems, which I was going to stab case in a more external 'mini- 
> gems' package (may be quite some time away).

I discussed using gem_prelude.rb with Yehuda Katz, and I think  
something like a 'rubygems-small.rb' would work:

module Gem; end
require 'gem_prelude'

This uses the gem_prelude.rb that gets compiled into ruby 1.9, and I  
think is workable in 1.8 as well.  I've not made any experiments with  
it, though.