[ruby-core:83426] [Ruby trunk Feature#8948] Frozen regex

Issue #8948 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze).


> Regexp class has no built-in destructive methods so freezing them does almost nothing; just prohibits method redefinitions.

I think it is useful in communicating this is a immutable object.
So singleton methods definitions are prevented (it has to behave like every other Regexp), but methods can be added to the Regexp class.
Adding instances variables to the Regexp are also prevented, which seems a good idea as attaching state to immutable object makes no sense.

I agree with the rationale that it seems safer to first only freeze Regexp literals.
Does /#{2*3}/ counts as literal though? That expression produces different instances, unlike the /#{2*3}/o variant.
I think it should be considered as literal and be frozen.
Then the distinction is between literals and Regexp.new, which is much clearer than "literals except those with interpolation but without /o".



----------------------------------------
Feature #8948: Frozen regex
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8948#change-67392

* Author: sawa (Tsuyoshi Sawada)
* Status: Assigned
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
* Target version: 
----------------------------------------
=begin
I see that frozen string was accepted for Ruby 2.1, and frozen array and hash are proposed in https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8909. I feel there is even more use case for a frozen regex, i.e., a regex literal that generates a regex only once. It is frequent to have a regex within a frequently repeated portion of code, and generating the same regex each time is a waste of resource. At the moment, we can have a code like:

    class Foo
      RE1 = /pattern1/
      RE2 = /pattern1/
      RE3 = /pattern1/
      def classify
        case self
        when RE1 then 1
        when RE2 then 2
        when RE3 then 3
        else 4
        end
      end
    end

but suppose we have a frozen `Regexp` literal `//f`. Then we can write like:

    class Foo
      def classify
        case self
        when /pattern1/f then 1
        when /pattern1/f then 2
        when /pattern1/f then 3
        else 4
        end
      end
    end

=end



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