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

Re:Ko1 at RubyConf 2014: Massive Garbage Collection Speedup ... by eloisius on Thursday November 20, 2014 @11:35AM (#8636552)

> 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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Re:Ko1 at RubyConf 2014: Massive Garbage Collection Speedup ... by markcampbell on Thursday November 20, 2014 @01:28PM (#8637230)

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.

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Re:Ko1 at RubyConf 2014: Massive Garbage Collection Speedup ... by reconbot on Saturday November 22, 2014 @10:08AM (#8645666)

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

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Re:Ko1 at RubyConf 2014: Massive Garbage Collection Speedup ... by riffraff on Saturday November 22, 2014 @01:32PM (#8646230)

symbols should also be instantiated at most once causing possible memory savings, but recent rubys should do that for frozen strings too.

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