[ruby-core:52282] [ruby-trunk - Feature #7791] Let symbols be garbage collected

Issue #7791 has been updated by marcandre (Marc-Andre Lafortune).


I don't think the goal is to simplify the life of ruby-core people.

I feel the goal is to have the best language possible be reasonably secure by default.

It would be sad if Ruby and its community suffered because of a reputation of insecurity, especially an insecurity by design that ruby-core won't address.

Maybe it will take a corporate sponsorship and a couple of weeks (months?) of full time work for someone to resolve the issue, but I don't see a fundamental reason why it couldn't be done.
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Feature #7791: Let symbols be garbage collected
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7791#change-36309

Author: rosenfeld (Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas)
Status: Feedback
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category: core
Target version: next minor


Lots of Denial-of-Service security vulnerabilities exploited in Ruby programs rely on symbols not being collected by garbage collector.

Ideally I'd prefer symbols and strings to behave exactly the same being just alternate ways of writing strings but I'll let this to another ticket.

This one simply asks for symbols to be allowed to be garbage collected when low on memory. Maybe one could set up some up-limit memory constraints dedicated to storing symbols. That way, the most accessed symbols would remain in that memory region and the least used ones would be reclaimed when the memory for symbols is over and a new symbol is created.

Or you could just allow symbols to be garbage collected any time. Any reasons why this would be a bad idea? Any performance benchmark demonstrating how using symbols instead of strings would make a real-world software perform much better?

Currently I only see symbols slowing down processing because people don't want to worry about it and will often use something like ActiveSupport Hash#with_indifferent_access or some other method to convert a string to symbol or vice versa...


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