
Ko1 at RubyConf 2014: Massive Garbage Collection Speedup in Ruby 2.2 - timr
https://www.omniref.com/blog/blog/2014/11/18/ko1-at-rubyconf-2014-massive-garbage-collection-speedup-in-ruby-2-dot-2/
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eloisius
> 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.

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markcampbell
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
You're right. Also they symbols won't be garbage collected if they are
currently keys in a hash.

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JohnBooty
This is awesome and I'm really looking forward to the fruits of the Ruby
team's much-appreciated hard work.

