You know how it is. At first you have to rip things apart before you can begin building things back up again. There’s been lots of ripping apart happening in RubyCLR over the past few weeks. A brand-new and very high performance reflection layer now lies underneath everything. And tonight I got the first vertical slice to work.

Here’s the unit test that now passes:

def test_default_ctor a = ArrayList.new assert_equal ‘System.Collections.ArrayList’, a.clr_type.full_name end

Here’s what the code used to look like for defining a method shim:

def self.method_shim(klass, method_info) method_labels = (1..method_info.signatures.length).collect { |i| (“l” + i.to_s).to_sym } create_safe_ruby_instance_method(klass, method_info.ruby_member_name) do match_sig method_info.member_id switch method_labels throw_clr ‘Cannot find method that matches Ruby parameters’ method_info.signatures.each_with_index do |sig, i| label method_labels[i] ld_this klass ld_params sig inst_call method_info, i ret_2rb method_info, i end end end

Here’s what it looks like now:

def self.method_shim(klass, method_name, members) method_labels = (1..members.length).collect { |i| (“l” + i.to_s).to_sym } create_safe_ruby_instance_method(klass, method_name) do match_sig add_members_to_signature_cache(members) switch method_labels throw_clr ‘Cannot find method that matches Ruby parameters’ members.each_with_index do |member, i| label method_labels[i] ld_this klass ld_params member.get_signature inst_call member ret_2rb member, i end end end

The new code is much better than the old code. In the old code, all type information was expressed using strings. This made things quite flexible, but at a severe performance penalty. There were many type lookup operations (to be fair, some of which were cached), but these are now eliminated in the new code.

I was also rather ashamed of the method_info data structure. It’s a rather central data structure in RubyCLR and it became the kitchen sink of metadata. It evolved over time and was never redesigned. In the new code it doesn’t exist anymore.

Tomorrow should be a fun day – I get to delete a ton of code that isn’t used anymore. I have far more fun deleting code than writing it.