On 7/27/14, 11:16 AM, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
On 7/13/14, 5:11 PM, yamadapc wrote:
Hello all :)
I've made a simple port of ruby's colorize library for D.
I'd greatly appreciate any feedback. Windows isn't supported,
yet.
Links:
http://code.dlang.org/packages/colorize
https://github.com/yamadapc/d-colorize
https://github.com/fazibear/colorize
It's nice, but it could be more efficient.
You usually use colors as a one-time shot to then output something to
the terminal. For example in Ruby it would be:
puts "hello".colorize.red.on_blue
In Ruby it's implemented using regular expressions, very ugly and not
very performant. In D you implemented it as returning another string
that contains the format, which allocates a new string that is short lived.
In Crystal we make colorize return a struct that wraps the original
value but contains the color information. Then when that struct is
converted to a string it appends the color codes to the output. In
Crystal there's to_s (similar to toString()) but also to_s(io), which
subclasses must override to append something to the given IO. That way
memory allocations are reduced drastically without needing to create
intermediate strings.
Here's the source code and some specs if you feel like copying this idea:
https://github.com/manastech/crystal/blob/master/src/colorize.cr
https://github.com/manastech/crystal/blob/master/spec/std/colorize_spec.cr
Also, usually the color is known by the user and not something that is
put in a variable and later read. So having convenience methods that
don't do a big case over the color or an enum value is again more
performant. Something like:
"hello".colorize.red
instead of:
"hello".colorize(fg.red)
which is shorter, more readable *and* more efficient.
You could generate those methods at compile time based on all the colors
(which is something we do in Crystal too).
