I won't make it tonight because while I thought I'd be recovered from illness by now, I'm still a little sick and don't want to infect the entire Houston Ruby community with a nasty virus!
But I had some ideas for code, so if you need some, here they are:
These commits to Rails might seem like bad code because they take something elegant and turn it into longer uglier code, but the performance gains are nice!
and
I linked to the PR instead of the commits so you all can read the discussion easily.
Another interesting one: a lot of people use the pattern [option, option2, option3].include?(option1) as a cleaner way of doing option1 == option1 || option1 == option2 || option1 == option3. But if it's in a method that gets called often, it results in poor performance due to all the array allocations:
https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/11955/commits and specifically this commit: https://github.com/SamSaffron/rails/commit/eb9f3e0a164be1299b5d5233f2e88d5dad654357
I prefer the nice pattern we've developed (using the array), but it's good to be cognizant of its pitfalls when it's used excessively (or called 1000s of times in a request)
Sorry for all the Sam Saffron commits. 😄 I was looking for one in particular that I'd run into trouble with in the past, and came across those when I was searching. Here's the one I think I was trying to find:
https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/12188/files
As you can see in the discussion surrounding the issue, it introduced some bugs (due to interaction w/ protected_attributes). IMO, part of the cause is the use of @instance vars everywhere -- it causes trouble, not the least of which is because it makes it hard to figure out what's defined where, and especially so in a code base like Rails, which has lots of modules included that rely on @vars defined elsewhere. I prefer to wrap them in methods, and it always helps if you need to refactor or change behavior of something surrounding the @var since you don't have to track down all the places it is referenced.
In any case, sorry I won't be able to make it tonight, but I hope the code referenced in this gist will spur the discussion.
Sam