4 ms·

Ko1 at RubyConf 2014: Massive Garbage Collection Speedup in Ruby 2.2

• eloisius 12y ago
  > In Ruby 2.2, symbols will be garbage collected like all other Ruby objects This sounds like it must be an oversimplification. What benefit do symbols have over strings, other than immutability? I thought their persistence in memory was a main selling point for using them as hash keys, for instance.
  • markcampbell 12y ago
    I don't think persistence in memory was the selling point. The other selling point is that doing comparisons are faster because `:a == :a` can compare on a memory address while `'a' == 'a'` requires comparing the data at the different memory addresses. Someone tell me I'm wrong.
    • reconbot 12y ago
      You're right. Also they symbols won't be garbage collected if they are currently keys in a hash.
    • riffraff 12y ago
      symbols should also be instantiated at most once causing possible memory savings, but recent rubys should do that for frozen strings too.
• JohnBooty 12y ago
  This is awesome and I'm really looking forward to the fruits of the Ruby team's much-appreciated hard work.