Comments on: To require or not require rubygems in your applications or libraries http://blog.mmediasys.com/2009/12/30/to-require-or-not-require-rubygems-in-your-applications-or-libraries/ Compartiendo fragmentos de código con el mundo. Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:33:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Phillip http://blog.mmediasys.com/2009/12/30/to-require-or-not-require-rubygems-in-your-applications-or-libraries/comment-page-1/#comment-3196 Phillip Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:24:30 +0000 http://blog.mmediasys.com/?p=323#comment-3196 It's not entirely subjective: It's a trade off, with measurable overhead. On the one hand, there's the known overhead of using RubyGems, which may or may not lock another developer into a specific configuration. On the other hand, there's the *unknown* overhead of dealing with versioning issues. You can figure that out, but it is difficult to track down, and costs time. It's a lot of yak shaving, in other words. You trade the ease of use of RubyGems for overhead, and you trade the overhead of keeping track of version conflicts for a smaller memory and CPU footprint. Me, I'd rather incur RubyGems' overhead than the hassle of maintaining my own repository of foreign sources (and quite likely different coding styles from my own, which adds another layer of complexity entirely). It’s not entirely subjective: It’s a trade off, with measurable overhead.

On the one hand, there’s the known overhead of using RubyGems, which may or may not lock another developer into a specific configuration.

On the other hand, there’s the unknown overhead of dealing with versioning issues. You can figure that out, but it is difficult to track down, and costs time. It’s a lot of yak shaving, in other words.

You trade the ease of use of RubyGems for overhead, and you trade the overhead of keeping track of version conflicts for a smaller memory and CPU footprint.

Me, I’d rather incur RubyGems’ overhead than the hassle of maintaining my own repository of foreign sources (and quite likely different coding styles from my own, which adds another layer of complexity entirely).

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