From: "Iñaki Baz Castillo" <ibc@...>
Date: 2009-04-02T18:28:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Symbols garbage collector in Ruby1.9, fixed?

2009/4/2 Michael Neumann <mneumann@ntecs.de>:
> I'd figure out what very common headers are and make them freezed constants,
> like:
>
>  FROM = "From".freeze
>  TO = "To".freeze
>
> and put references to those string "constants" as keys into the Hash. I
> assume that this will be as fast as symbols when accessing the hash with
> those constants, as equality testing just needs to tests for object identity
> (object_id) and not for the equality of the content.
>
>  headers = {}
>  headers[FROM] = "alice@qweeq"
>  headers[TO] = "bob@qweqwe"

Very interesting solution, but I would have some issues with it:

a) I receive a request with various headers, most of them are well
kwnown but others can be custom.
When I extract the header name (after parsing) I get "From" and
"Custom-Header" strings, and I need to check if these strings belongs
to well known headers or not before storing them as FROM and
"Custom-Header". Wouldn't this check be inneficient?

b) Some wellk wnown headers have a name like "Record-Route". The "-"
symbol is of course dissallowed as Ruby Constant. Using Symbols I can
use it as :"record-route".

Well, I have to think about it. Thanks a lot for all the received help. Regards.



> Btw, this is the approach that for example Mongrel uses.

Then I must investigate how it handles case b).


-- 
Iñaki Baz Castillo
<ibc@aliax.net>