pat_shaughnessy

> Idiomatic Ruby uses blocks for loop bodies

Yes that's something I want to dig into and explore in this chapter... when exactly does Ruby's JIT compiler activate and optimize our code? And you're right: since Ruby will JIT blocks as if they were separate function many loops will be optimized using this simple heuristic.

What a lovely comment - thank you!

I tried that while researching the article, but found the call to "puts" doesn't link without the standard library code. And without a "puts" or similar call to produce output LLVM optimized the entire program away :)

I suppose this could work if, as you suggest, I manually called out to a lib_c function like printf instead.

(author here) ...FYI I actually learned assembly language for the first time back in the 1970s and 80s using a 6809 inside a Radio Shack "Color Computer." I was super-fun at the time. I don't remember much of it now but I'm sure x86 isn't as clean or fun as 6809 assembly was.

Thanks a lot. I'm looking forward to writing it, I think it will be interesting.

Thanks! Glad to hear you made it to the bottom :) I always worry that I tend to write on and on for too long.

Thank you! Knowing that people enjoy reading this sort of thing makes it worthwhile.

Thanks everyone for the kind comments, and for taking the time to read this stuff :)

Yes, good point. Rails has a lot of conventions like this - that "first" implies ordering by primary key (by default). I just imagine that most Rails developers don't think about sorting and its implications when they ask for the first record.

Oh absolutely. I thought about saying that, and just ran out of energy before posting the article this morning.

The reason I used this particular SQL statement as an example is that ActiveRecord (a Ruby ORM) generates it from a fairly simple, common Ruby expression. I suppose ActiveRecord could be improved to drop the sort when you know there's one one possible match.

By the way, I used a simple query on purpose to keep things simple for readers (and for me, the author!). By using such a simple SQL statement I was able to avoid complex optimizations and algorithms I would haven't been able to follow - and that wouldn't have helped readers much anyway. I wanted to get the basic idea across to people who have no prior knowledge of DB internals.

Plus I wasn't interested in comparing one DB vs. another, as much as I was interested in understanding how any DB works.

Thanks :) Yea indexes are where some of the real "magic" of database servers happens. It will be fun to write that up...