Object removal using seam carving, still fast – [Going back to performance, Ruby pretty much forces you to think in terms of arrays and hashes — core structures implemented in C. Very often, the asymptotic gains from another structure are more than offset by the multiplicative constant, as low-level code in Ruby is at least 100-200 times slower… Being able to code a new data structure in 20 lines when you need it (see the RB tree example included in rocaml that is 3X faster than the rbtree extension) feels great. Especially with functional ones.]
Fast content-aware image resizing – [two-order-of-magnitude speed increase. This was slightly surprising because the Python version uses optimized extensions written in C, and Psyco should have brought the parts written in Python to at least one tenth of the native speed. In this case, the key, it turns out, was not the implementation language but the algorithm itself. ]
Code hosted at eigenclass.org – [* [[rocaml|https://eigenclass.org/repos/rocaml/]], a tool allowing you to write Ruby extensions in OCaml very easily]
Changes in Ruby 1.9 – [This is useful to debug Ruby extensions (such as Syck).]
Related document discovery, without algebra – [well, LSI in pure ruby works, but is really more of a toy. A full SVD on anything large is computationally intensive. Even using something like GSL or an NArray extension (or LAPACK interface, etc.) its scaling is a bit ..um.. difficult.]
Plugins in your Ruby application – [Excellent post! it is quite easy to add dependency handling (must be run before/after given plugin) and extension points. If you are interested, see my ]
Automagic (generalizable) working set discovery, improved ruby-wmii WM scripting 0.2.1 – [Wael: I’m working on a way to simplify updates & allow people to publish/exchange extensions easily. This is a fairly interesting problem actually (how to manage sw distribution&deployment, API changes and backwards compatibility in a situation very given to breakage).]
Scripting the wmii-3 window manager with Ruby – [I used to have a Ruby extension to use the IXP IPC, but I haven’t recompiled it against the latest libixp and the wmiir tool does the work nicely (if slowly) for now:]
rcov: code coverage for Ruby – [The full install (which includes the rcovrt extension that makes rcov over 100 times faster) requires a working build environment and Ruby >=1.8.3. ]
rcov 0.3.0: happier Rails (code coverage analysis) – [If you’re under win32 and cannot build extensions, you can also get the pre-built {{attach_anchor("rcovrt.so")}} binary. This extension was cross-compiled using mingw; [[here’s more information about how to cross-compile for win32|cross compiling rcovrt]].]
