Openhood Experiments

The Cucumber team released some days ago a beta of the 0.7.0 version. With this release comes one thing we were waiting for a long time : Gherkin integration.

Gherkin is a new parser for the Gherkin language which features are written in. It’s using Ragel and thus generate fast parsers in pure Ruby, C (MRI extension) and Java.

A thread about the performance this brings was started in the Cukes Google Group for the v0.7.0.beta.2 release.

Here’s what we got when switching from Cucumber v0.6.4 to v0.7.0.beta.2:

162 Features
902 Scenario
12993 Steps

Cucumber 0.6.4 :
  Parsing feature files took 1m44s

Cucumber v0.7.0.beta.2
  Parsing feature files took 0m1s

This means our cucumber startup time dropped from nearly 2 minutes to … instant.

Now, what’s your results ?