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I have just released rufus-tokyo 0.1.9 (sudo gem install rufus-tokyo)

Rufus-tokyo provides rubyist friendly classes for accessing Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant structures. It does so by binding Tokyo C libraries via FFI and …

Hirabayashi-san, the author of Tokyo Cabinet and Tyrant provides a ‘native’ Ruby library for Tokyo Cabinet and a pure Ruby library for Tokyo Tyrant. My initial motivation for writing rufus-tokyo was that those classes are very C oriented and I wanted to interact in an elegant way with the Tokyo ‘products’.

Another issue was that the author was not providing his libraries via gem install. But this has changed, Dane Jensen is now mirroring the libraries (cabinet, tyrant) at github and releasing them as gems (sudo gem install careo-tokyocabinet careo-tokyotyrant –source http://gems.github.com)

As Ilya Grigorik pointed out FFI is slower than extconf.rb classical Ruby to C bindings. I wanted to benefit from the speed of the ‘native’ bindings.

I have added to rufus-tokyo a Rufus::Edo namespace with 2 classes (cabinet, table) wrapping the ‘native’ ruby gem and 2 classes wrapping the ‘pure’ Ruby classes (cabinet, table) for Tyrant. The ‘pure’ ruby classes for Tyrant, despite being a bit slow are interesting because they don’t require the installation of the Cabinet + Tyrant libraries.

There is a bit of documentation at :

http://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-tokyo/tree/master/lib/rufus/edo

The Rufus::Tokyo classes and the Rufus::Edo classes have the same methods, making it easy to plug one for the other. For instance, in my workflow engine (ruote), I’ve made sure the native bindings are used if present. At instantiation/connection time, the right class (native vs FFI, Edo vs Tokyo) is chosen, the rest of the code is the same.

Here is a tiny decision table for choosing which ruby lib to use :

If only need a btree or a hash (no tables) served by a Tyrant, a native libmemcached wrapper might be a good option if speed is a must (yes, Tokyo Tyrant speaks ‘memcached’).

I have some very naive benchmarks at http://gist.github.com/71285 (Tokyo Cabinet 1.4.8 and Tyrant 1.1.16). Unfortunately the memcached part is not done with a native libmemcached wrapper.

rufus-tokyo : http://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-tokyo/