Hacker News Reader

Comment by tta | Hacker News Reader

rbenv (https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv) is better than RVM.

I used rbenv for a while but what killed it for me was the huge startup lag it adds to every invocation of ruby or any other bin installed via a gem. I was seeing delays of 4-5 sec which disappeared when I switched to RVM. The universe of tools and integration is also far better in RVM land (though this may have changed more recently).

I had this problem right when I started using rbenv. Eventually with some help I realized that just starting bash was slightly slow, and that all the various bash scripts that rbenv runs were compounding this for a 2+ second startup.

In my case, everything was fixed by moving the the things that only need to be run in login shells out of my ~/.bashrc (where they should have been in the first place).

See the bug I filed against rbenv at the time:

https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/issues/70

Since that time, I've been using rbenv exclusively (development and production) and it's been great.

Most users don't care if rbenv is better than rvm since they do the same thing, and apparently, at least according to the other poster, rbenv is slow

> according to the other poster, rbenv is slow

Define slow:

    $ time /home/lloeki/.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p286/bin/ruby -e 'exit'
    real	0m0.012s
    user	0m0.007s
    sys 	0m0.003s

    $ rbenv global
    1.9.3-p286

    $ time /home/lloeki/.rbenv/shims/ruby -e 'exit'
    real	0m0.055s
    user	0m0.027s
    sys 	0m0.007s

Hardly something to cry foul for. Your first significant require will blow that time by an order of magnitude.

And hardly surprising either since rbenv the alias calls rbenv the command, which sets a few env vars then calls rbenv-$1 (probably $1==exec), which calls rbenv-hooks $1 (probably a noop by default) then $1 + args. rbenv is seriously thin.

> huge startup lag it adds to every invocation of ruby or any other bin installed via a gem

Sounds more like bundler (maybe automatically started by ohmyzsh when just typing 'ruby' where you have a Gemfile):

    $ time bundle exec ruby -e 'exit'
    real	0m0.570s
    user	0m0.480s
    sys 	0m0.057s

or as mentioned, someone put too much stuff in his bashrc or something.

quantify "better"

I won't quantify, but qualify: it works without a pile of hacks like bastardizing cd, which fails in various real-world scenarios.

What do they need to override cd for?

From the scripts/cd source [0]:

    # Source a .rvmrc file in a directory after changing to it, if it exists.  To
    # disable this feature, set rvm_project_rvmrc=0 in /etc/rvmrc or $HOME/.rvmrc

IMHO rvm is completely overkill and suffers from overengineering.

[0]: https://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/blob/master/scripts/cd

Reply on news.ycombinator.com