From: eregontp@...
Date: 2019-11-05T22:24:35+00:00
Subject: [ruby-core:95711] [Ruby master Feature#16150] Add a way to request a frozen string from to_s

Issue #16150 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze).


I'm sorry if the above is rude.

I find it frustrating that the change is reverted without much else than "a possible incompatibility reported by one user" and for which we already have a plan to address it easily (just use the latest Rails of that release series, which is likely already needed for other fixes).

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Feature #16150: Add a way to request a frozen string from to_s
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16150#change-82495

* Author: headius (Charles Nutter)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: Eregon (Benoit Daloze)
* Target version: 
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Much of the time when a user calls to_s, they are just looking for a simple string representation to display or to interpolate into another string. In my brief exploration, the result of to_s is rarely mutated directly.

It seems that we could save a lot of objects by providing a way to explicitly request a *frozen* string.

For purposes of discussion I will call this to_frozen_string, which is a terrible name.

This would reduce string allocations dramatically when applied to many common to_s calls:

* Symbol#to_frozen_string could always return the same cached String representation. This method is *heavily* used by almost all Ruby code that intermingles Symbols and Strings.
* nil, true, false, and any other singleton values in the system could similarly cache and return the same String object.
* The strings coming from core types could also be in the fstring cache and deduplicated as a result.
* User-provided to_s implementations could opt-in to caching and returning the same frozen String object when the author knows that the result will always be the same.

A few ideas for what to call this:

* `to_fstring` or `fstring` reflects internal the "fstring" cache but is perhaps not obvious for most users.
* `to_s(frozen: true)` is clean but there will be many cases when the kwargs hash doesn't get eliminated, making matters worse.
* `def to_s(frozen = false)` would be mostly free but may not be compatible with existing to_s params (like `Integer#to_s(radix)`

This idea was inspired by @schneems's talk at RubyConf Thailand, where he showed significant overhead in ActiveRecord from Symbol#to_s allocation.



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