Gem Dependencies

Eric Hodel | Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:28:40 GMT

Posted in Ruby, Rubygems

I was chatting with Yehuda Katz, and somehow we ended up talking about speed:

Eric Hodel: I don’t worry about inheritance

Eric Hodel: or speed, for that matter

Yehuda Katz: heh

Yehuda Katz: that’s why you wrote RubyInline?

Eric Hodel: Ryan wrote RubyInline because, roughly, “How hard could it be?”

Eric Hodel: and an intense hatred of C

This got me thinking, how long did it take from RubyInline to be written until it was actually used? The RubyGems answer is 151 days, and by ParseTree, but RubyInline is actually about 2 years older than its gem, first committed on 2002/09/05.

To figure this out, I wrote a script that walks all the gems and figures out when a gem was first released, when a gem was first mentioned in a dependency, and the time between the two. Today, the figures are:

681 of 3234 gems used as dependencies (21%)
average time to first use is 148 days
maximum time to first use is 1332 (dnssd)

You can get the full output in the gem dependency report (which updates weekly), and download the gem dependency script too.

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