Ayende has been discussing the different ways of actually creating objects in .NET and the perf cost associated to each of them.  I thought I'd add to the mix one more method, using the DLR.  I've talked to several people who have identified concerns with the speed of the DLR so I found the results rather interesting.  The context is still the same, identify the time it takes to construct one million Created instances.

The delegate: 

delegate Created CreateInstance(int num, string name);

The structure:

    public class Created
    {
        public int Num;
        public string Name;

        public Created(int num, string name)
        {
            Num = num;
            Name = name;
        }
    }

 Grab the constructor:

ConstructorInfo ci = typeof (Created).GetConstructors()[0];

Define the parameters to be passed to the constructor (relative to the code block we are about to define):

Variable num = Variable.Parameter(SymbolTable.StringToId("num"), typeof (int));
Variable name = Variable.Parameter(SymbolTable.StringToId("name"), typeof (string));

Build a code block with the Ast factories for building expressions (this builds our function for creating new Created instances with our parameters):

CodeBlock block = Ast.CodeBlock("CreateInstance", typeof (Created),
                                  Ast.Return(Ast.New(ci, new Expression[] {Ast.Read(num), Ast.Read(name)})),
                                  new Variable[] {num, name}, new Variable[0]);

Compile our block:

CreateInstance create_instance = TreeCompiler.CompileBlock<CreateInstance>(block); 

 Invoke the compiled instance:

int iterations = 1000000;
Stopwatch watch = Stopwatch.StartNew();
for (int i = 0; i < iterations; i++)
{
     create_instance(i, i.ToString());
}

The results are rather impressive, the run time on my machine was 00:00:00.2737688.  It looks like creating objects within the DLR via a dynamic code block is pretty cheap.  I've included the source here if you want to run the example.  The DLR bits are based off a release from CodePlex two days ago, the RubyForge bits are much older and will not compile with the above code.  Thoughts?

So John Lam annouced the alpha release of IronRuby, he mentions that they did a lot of work on string and arrays, unfortunately, with the current release .NET types aren't able to execute Ruby mixins. I was hoping to do something like the following:

require 'mscorlib' 

require 'System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'  



list = System::Collections::ArrayList.new

list.Add(5) 

list.Add(10)

list.Add(15)

list.extend Enumerable

list.each {|i| puts i.to_i}



The following code does execute:



require 'mscorlib'

require 'System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'

require 'System.Drawing, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' 

require 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'



Application = System::Windows::Forms::Application

Form = System::Windows::Forms::Form

Button = System::Windows::Forms::Button

Point = System::Drawing::Point 

Size = System::Drawing::Size 

MessageBox = System::Windows::Forms::MessageBox  

window = Form.new window.text = 'Testing IronRuby' 

window.size = Size.new(250, 200)

button = Button.new 

button.text = 'Click Me' 

button.location = Point.new(75, 75)

button.click {|sender, e| MessageBox.show 'I was clicked'}

window.controls.add(button)

Application.EnableVisualStyles

Application.run(window)

Of all the windowing toolkits I've seen for Ruby, the .NET Framework is the easiest to read for me, although I'm sure toolkits like Swiby will get noticed, especially due to it's DSL syntax which is the new hotness in the development world these days. Next up, extending the IronRuby Builtins.

Some of you may know that I like to play around with other programming languages, one of those being Ruby. I came across a t-shirt the other day and thought it was pretty funny. I modified it just a tad so you can run it from the console. Here it is:

As I mentioned earlier I would be posting an entry showing how to test your .NET code with Ruby. John Lam recently posted an example using Python.NET to test a C# class so I though I would use his C# example to show how you would do this with Ruby. First off, you will need the Ruby/.NET Bridge which is available here. Here is the C# class that we will be testing:

Next, compile that with the following command line:

This will generate a Calc.dll file which you can load in your Ruby code as follows:

Run your code by calling "Ruby calctest.rb". Your output should be as follows:

The test suite automatically runs all instance methods that start with 'test'. That's it, we can easily add or change new test cases in Ruby to test our Calc class that was written in C#.

I’ve been awarded the Visual C# MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award from Microsoft for 2005! I just received the email tonight with all the details regarding the program. This is a great honor, I was really delighted when I found out I had been selected. I am really looking forward to the MVP Global Summit; it will be a great chance to visit Seattle, friends and some family that live there.

I know I had mentioned that my first post of the New Year would reflect using the .NET Framework from Ruby, but I am currently working on an issue with overriding the WndProc within Ruby, I hope to go over this soon in an upcoming post. Wow, what a great way to start out the year!