Description
I've made a few performance improvements to the Ruby Avro decoder. In my tests (decoding a complex record with many fields and nested records), I saw a 40% speedup on MRI 1.8.7 and a 20% speedup on MRI 1.9.3. The improved code also makes about half as many object allocations as before.
Main changes are:
- Using symbols instead of strings for the various schema types (there was actually a FIXME in the code for this, now fixed)
- Added a few memoizations to avoid unnecessarily recomputing values
I've tried to keep the API unchanged — Avro::Schema#type still returns a string, as users may be relying on the type (Avro::Schema#type_sym has the symbolized version). So I don't think this patch introduces any compatibility problems (as long as apps aren't relying on internals of the Avro library).