From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2003-06-23T03:40:02+09:00
Subject: Re: In 1.8.0 nil.to_s is not the same as ""


On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> | The problem is not here : do someone has verified *all* the use of
> | RSTRING(str)->ptr in ruby ?
> I assumed tests should be done before releasing 1.8 when I changed ptr
> value to be NULL for empty strings.  Apparently it's not true, so that
> I will fill "" for ptr again for 1.8.0.

If you want to save memory, then instead of pointing to NULL, it could be
pointed to a global buffer containing only a \0, e.g.:

const char *const rb_str_empty = "";

[...]
RSTRING(str)->ptr = rb_str_empty;

or something like that.

the fact it's global is shared does not really matter except that no
attempt should be made to deallocate it. Whenever the string is grown, the
->ptr gets overwritten with a freshly allocated buffer.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju