[ruby-core:26500] Re: HashWithIndifferentAccess to core

Hi,

Appreciate the feedback.

At the moment most Ruby web frameworks running on an MRI VM is  
affected by Symbol's immutability and the risk of DoS attacks
( sizeof(VALUE), 4 bytes ) as mentioned by Rick in an earlier post.

I've seen various implementations of this pattern :  
ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess (Rails), Mash (Merb), Sinatra  
etc.

This patch is the result of spending some of an afternoon getting  
familiar with the VM again in preparation for an upcoming talk
and in light of a push for this from Rails core, extracted something  
cleaner than the mixed 1.8 / 1.9 hwia gem.

The gem also includes a lot of code duplication for not having all the  
required core Hash methods exposed via intern.h

I do however understand that just because nested query params happen  
to map well to a Hash, doesn't mean a core class should
be enhanced to support this feature.There's the less obtrusive option of

* exposing Symbol#hash == String#hash for "string" == :string
* Implement hashing very similar to the identhash scheme in 1.9,  
hooked through Hash#strhash
* extract a UrlParam or similar gem / extension etc. that piggy backs  
off this feature ( iow. delegate the nested conversion macro elsewhere )

Thoughts ?

- Lourens

On 2009/11/03, at 16:27, Urabe Shyouhei wrote:

> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>> I am negative.
>>
>>  * the class name is too long, and not clear, at least for me.
>
> You mean HashWithIndifferentAccess?  That longer name is for an  
> equivalent code
> from ActiveSupport.  The author of this request names his class  
> "StrHash".
>
>>  * it might be useful for some cases, but not so common to make it
>>    built-in, I think.
>
> But that "some" case is actually HUGE.  Almost all Rails application  
> uses this
> (sort of) as if it were a built-in ruby feature.  It would be great  
> when this
> was a true built-in.
>
>>  * if it's not for built-in, it can be implemented by external
>>    library, such as a gem, or active_support.
>
> The author of this request does have a gem for it.
> http://github.com/methodmissing/hwia
>