From: shevegen@... Date: 2019-09-21T08:33:20+00:00 Subject: [ruby-core:95016] [Ruby master Feature#16153] eventually_frozen flag to gradually phase-in frozen strings Issue #16153 has been updated by shevegen (Robert A. Heiler). Hmm. I can somewhat understand the proposal, but I believe you would also add a bit more complexity here; you need to remember that ruby users may have to understand the idea behind this too, and that adds a bit of complexity. A bit like the Maybe monad in Haskell ... :P Personally I think it would be much simpler to not introduce this, and to instead have matz decide WHEN frozen strings will become the default (you may refer to all frozen objects but I think strings are the big ones, due to them being used so much in ruby programs out there). The main question or issue that matz mentioned was in regards to backwards compatibility, e. g. for people to transition from ruby 2.x to ruby 3.0 without much problem, which is understandable in my opinion (see the migration from ruby 1.8.x to ruby 2.0 which was not trivial for everyone). On the other hand, I actually think it would be better to, rather than add more complexity here, actually do the switch even if it may be painful for people, just as headius proposed to then have frozen strings by default for ruby 3.0. You can probably handle some of the problems e. g. make some exception for old gems so that they work as-is or something. I would prefer that much more compared to a maybe-frozen situation; although I am also perfectly fine with frozen strings not being the default in 3.0 either. At this point all my current and actively maintained code has a frozen-string comment so the change would not affect my own code anyway; may be harder for cod that is not maintained though. I think the naming is not necessarily the biggest issue here; even with a better name it may add complexity. Remember that in ruby 1.8 people did not have to think about it much at all since there were no frozen strings; or at the least I can barely remember much code with "abc".freeze all over. That somehow was found in later ruby code, where some people literally applied .freeze to just about everything they could get their hands on. I always found this sort of strange, too. ---------------------------------------- Feature #16153: eventually_frozen flag to gradually phase-in frozen strings https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16153#change-81643 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal * Assignee: * Target version: ---------------------------------------- Freezing objects can give us a nice performance boost, but freezing previously non-frozen objects is a backward-incompatible change which is hard to handle because the place where the object is mutated can be far from where it was frozen, and tests might not cover the cases of frozen input vs non-frozen input. I propose adding a flag which gives us a migration path for freezing objects. For purposes of discussion I will call this flag "eventually_frozen". It would act as a pseudo-frozen flag where mutating the object would result in a warning instead of an error. It would also change the return value of `Object#frozen?` so code like `obj = obj.dup if obj.frozen?` would work as expected to remove the warning. Note that eventually_frozen strings cannot be deduplicated, as they are in reality mutable. This way it would be possible for Symbol#to_s (and many others) to return an eventually_frozen string in 2.7 which gives apps and gems time to migrate, before finally becoming a frozen deduplicated string in 3.0. This might even open up a migration path for eventually using `frozen_string_literal:true` as default. For example if it was possible to add `frozen_string_literal:eventual` to all files in a project (or as a global switch), we could run that in production to discover where to fix things, and then change it to `frozen_string_literal:true` for a bug-free performance boost. Proposed changes: * Object#freeze(immediately:true) * if `immediately` keyword is true, set frozen=true and eventually_frozen=false * if `immediately` keyword is false, set eventually_frozen=true UNLESS frozen flag is already true * String#+@ * if eventually_frozen is true, create a duplicate string with eventually_frozen=false * Object#frozen?(immediately:false) * return true if `immediately` keyword is false and eventually_frozen flag is true * rb_check_frozen * output warning if eventually_frozen flag is true -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/ Unsubscribe: