From: Dido Sevilla <dido.sevilla@...>
Date: 2012-02-10T16:28:28+09:00
Subject: Symbol garbage collection

I've always wondered why Ruby didn't do garbage collection of symbols,
when Lisp implementations here and there did so, and in fact they are
essential in macro programming because Lisp programs tend to create a
lot of unique symbols at runtime, especially in macro code, with such
contrivances as gensym in Scheme and Common Lisp and uniq in Arc. Once
upon a time I studied how Ruby implemented symbols and while this
representation made symbol garbage collection difficult, it did not by
any means make it impossible. In addition to my work on Ruby I am also
writing an interpreter for Arc in C, and I made it use just about the
same representation as Ruby 1.8 did for symbols. I also devised an
algorithm to do symbol garbage collection with that same
representation.

http://arcueid-arc.org/2012/02/10/symbols-and-symbol-garbage-collection-arcueid-vs-ruby/

I see no reason why the same approach will not work with Ruby as well.

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