[ruby-core:97881] [Ruby master Misc#16047] Reconsider impact of frozen_string_literal on dynamic strings

Issue #16047 has been updated by ngan (Ngan Pham).


I find myself only applying ".freeze" to all-cap constants:

RED = "red".freeze

I think it would nice if Ruby 3 automatically froze string that are declared/assigned to constants.

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Misc #16047: Reconsider impact of frozen_string_literal on dynamic strings
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16047#change-85103

* Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
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The rationale for introducing `frozen_string_literal` was because rubyists were starting to litter their code with `"".freeze` for optimization, and it's ugly.

But by using frozen_string_literal we introduce the opposite problem: we must litter the code with `"".dup` in order to have mutable strings, and it's ugly.

The rationale for freezing all strings including dynamic was because it's [easy to explain]
(https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1D0Eo5N7NE_unIySOKG9lVj_eyXf66BQPM4PKp7NvMyQ/pub)
This may be true, but at the expense of making it cumbersome to use. And freezing dynamic strings is useless (no-op) for memory optimization, but making it mutable again via `"foo #{bar}".dup` means we allocate two strings where only one was needed before.

In my personal experience using frozen_string_literal, I find that static strings are usually ok to freeze without changing anything else, but that freezing dynamic strings often create bugs that require `+""` or `"".dup` boilerplate to circumvent. So in the end I found myself stopping regular use of that feature, since it's more trouble than it's worth.

As such I'd like to ask other rubyists how has been their experience with **actually using** frozen_string_literal on a day-to-day basis; if my experience is unique or common. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.



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