Avoid excessive AST traversal for Routing

How much of a speedup does this gain?

I just ran some self.z= vs. @z= micro-benchmarks and had to run a large number of these before I saw an obvious difference.

ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [amd64-freebsd7]

Mike,

I'll attach benchmarks in a bit.

We've got 5 namespaces, each with 10 to 15 odd controllers.

Each map.resources spawns 14 routes ( excluding custom via :collection or :member ) by default.

class Bar

attr_accessor :foo

def method_a

self.foo #method lookup

end

def method_b

foo #method lookup

end

def method_c

@foo #no method lookup

end

end

Routing, especially with a large routes.rb file, features prominently in profiler output as well as bleakhouse dumps.

Bottom line being you'd notice no difference with a limited number of routes.

BleakHouse has nothing to do with runtime performance.

I'm them having trouble imagining that is change makes a difference on real apps, and it makes the code harder to understand and introspect.

Thanks for time spent in reviewing this.