From: jean.boussier@...
Date: 2019-06-19T15:55:05+00:00
Subject: [ruby-core:93251] [Ruby trunk Feature#15940] Coerce symbols internal fstrings in UTF8 rather than ASCII to better share memory with string literals

Issue #15940 has been updated by byroot (Jean Boussier).


In order to provide some data, I counted the duplicates in a Redmine heap dump (`ObjectSpace.dump_all`):

Here the counting code:

```ruby
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# frozen_string_literal: true
require 'json'

fstrings = []
STDIN.each do |line|
  object = JSON.parse(line)
  fstrings << object if object['fstring']
end

counts = {}
fstrings.each do |str|
  counts[str['value']] ||= 0
  counts[str['value']] += 1
end
duplicates = counts.select { |k, v| v > 1 }.map(&:first)

puts "total fstrings: #{fstrings.size}"
puts "dups: #{duplicates.size}"
puts "sample:"
puts duplicates.first(20)
```

And the results for Redmine:

```
total fstrings: 84678
dups: 3686
sample:
changes
absent
part
EVENTS
RANGE
OBJECT
Silent
EXCEPTION
Settings
DATE
Index
Graph
COMPLEX
Definition
fcntl
inline
lockfile
update
gemfile
oth
```

That's about 4% of the fstring table being duplicates.

I also ran the script against one much bigger private app, and the duplicate ratio was similar, but the table was an order of magnitude bigger.

----------------------------------------
Feature #15940: Coerce symbols internal fstrings in UTF8 rather than ASCII to better share memory with string literals
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15940#change-78701

* Author: byroot (Jean Boussier)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Target version: 
----------------------------------------
Patch: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/2242

It's not uncommon for symbols to have literal string counterparts, e.g.

```ruby
class User
  attr_accessor :name

  def as_json
    { 'name' => name }
  end
end
```

Since the default source encoding is UTF-8, and that symbols coerce their internal fstring to ASCII when possible, the above snippet will actually keep two instances of `"name"` in the fstring registry. One in ASCII, the other in UTF-8.

Considering that UTF-8 is a strict superset of ASCII, storing the symbols fstrings as UTF-8 instead makes no significant difference, but allows in most cases to reuse the equivalent string literals.

The only notable behavioral change is `Symbol#to_s`.

Previously `:name.to_s.encoding` would be `#<Encoding:US-ASCII>`.
After this patch it's `#<Encoding:UTF-8>`. I can't foresee any significant compatibility impact of this change on existing code.

However, there are several ruby specs asserting this behavior, but I don't know if they can be changed or not: https://github.com/ruby/spec/commit/a73a1c11f13590dccb975ba4348a04423c009453

If this specification is impossible to change, then we could consider changing the encoding of the String returned by `Symbol#to_s`, e.g in ruby pseudo code:

```ruby
def to_s
  str = fstr.dup
  str.force_encoding(Encoding::ASCII) if str.ascii_only?
  str
end
```





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