HaversineFast

This takes advantage of C being faster at calculating double floating point values then say ruby. A project necessitated the haversine calculation frequently which would be sub optimal in ruby. There were gems that I found that did this which were either old (2+ years,) or they ran on ruby which defeated the purpose, or did a lot more then just calculate the minimum distance between two points on an ellipsoid. Either way this was a nice exercise to remove external dependencies and optimize a continuous calculation.

Per wikipedia:

$haversine\left ( \fracdr \right ) = haversin\left ( \phi _2 - \phi _1 \right ) + cos\left ( \phi _1 \right )cos\left ( \phi _2 \right )haversin\left ( \lambda _2 - \lambda _1 \right )$

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'haversine_fast'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install haversine_fast

Usage

Contributing

Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/haversine_fast/fork )
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create a new Pull Request