From: Kurt Stephens <ks@...>
Date: 2009-11-23T11:16:03+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:26869] Caching #to_s for immutables (and a possible future for constant-folding)

   I have a proof-of-concept patch to MRI that caches #to_s values for 
immutable values.  It is implemented using a few fixed size hash tables.

   It reduces the number of #to_s Strings created during the MRI test 
suite for NilClass, TrueClass, FalseClass, Symbol and Float objects by 
1890 Strings.

   It requires a minor semantic change to Ruby core.  In practice, most 
Ruby String literals quickly become garbage.  This minor change could 
cascade into a huge performance improvement for all Ruby implementations 
-- as will be illustrated below:

     #to_s may return frozen Strings.

   This appears to not be a problem since any callers of #to_s are 
likely to anticipate that the receiver may already be a String and are 
not going to mutate it -- it is a coercion.  If this proves problematic, 
a Object#dup_if_frozen method might be helpful.  (Aside: a fast 
#dup_unless_frozen method might be helpful for general memoization of 
computations! :)

   This caching technique could be extended into other immutables (the 
Numerics) and objects whose #to_s representations never change (Class, 
Module?) and for #inspect under similar constraints.

   In the patch, Fixnum#to_s is not cached because Fixnums are often 
incremented during long loops, thus, any cache is quickly churned. 
However, this could be enabled if it proves useful in practice.

   If this new semantic for #to_s is reasonable, I recommend explicitly 
storing frozen strings for true.to_s, false.to_s, nil.to_s and storing 
Symbol#to_s with each Symbol, likewise for #inspect.

   If Symbol#to_s was guaranteed to be always be cached, this would 
enable the use of:

   puts :"some string".to_s

instead of

   puts "some string"

, as an in-line memoized frozen String that creates no garbage for a 
consumer that will never mutate it.  A parser or compiler could 
recognize Symbol#to_s as an operation with no side-effect and elide it, 
providing a true String constant.  This idiom would irradiate the 
pointless String garbage created by the evaluation of every lexical 
String literal.

   This is far more expressive and concise than:

   SOME_STRING = "some string".freeze
   ...
   puts SOME_STRING

   The alternative to :"some string".to_s might be to memoize all String 
constants literals as frozen.  This is a superior syntax, but old code 
would need to change on a massive scale, but would be easy to diagnose, 
to support this semantic:

   str = ''       # make mutable empty string.
   str << "foo"   # "foo" is garbage
   str << "bar"   # "bar" is garbage

would become:

   str = ''.dup   # make mutable empty string.
   str << "foo"   # "foo" is not garbage
   str << "bar"   # "bar" is not garbage

The latter code is backwards compatible with the current String literal 
semantics.

Let me know if anyone is interested in this idea and patch:

Kurt Stephens