Re: Best practice of writing Rails code

XPlay E. wrote in post #1064453:
> I'm dealing with some issue about best practice of how to use Rails
> code.

Rails questions should be raised on a Rails mailing list, but the 
question you discuss is also just something about Ruby in general.

> So, what's the best way to write the following lines that basicaly does
> the same thing?
>
> Let's say we have a link that needs to be a button with some parameters
> (theme, size and icon)
>
> 1. = link_to "Login", "#", class: "button", data: {theme: "green", size:
> "large", icon: "small-arrow"}
> vs.
> 2. = link_to "Login", "#", class: :button, data: {theme: :green, size:
> :large, icon: "small-arrow"}
>
> both of them should generate something like this
> <a class="button" data-theme="green" data-size="large"
> data-icon="small-arrow">Login</a>

The difference is that :button is a Symbol, whereas "button" is a 
String.

There is a small performance difference:

* Symbols are singleton objects. Whenever you use :button in your code, 
the same (immutable) object instance is returned. The symbol persists 
indefinitely.

puts :foo.object_id
puts :foo.object_id  # same

* Strings are mutable objects. The literal "button" returns a new object 
every time it is executed. Try this in irb:

10.times { puts "foo".object_id }

So the symbol version is technically more efficient where the same 
symbol is being used over and over again. It is also quicker to test for 
equality (two Symbols are equal if their object_id is the same, you 
don't have to compare them character by character). For this reason they 
are often used as Hash keys.

In practice, the difference in almost all real programs is negligible, 
so you should not get hung up over the performance issue. If you're 
talking Rails apps, almost certainly things like database accesses will 
be many orders of magnitude slower.

As you have found, symbols which contain special characters need quoting 
anyway, so
Symbol :"foo bar" is actually less convenient than String "foo bar"

So use whatever feels best to you, i.e. makes you more productive as a 
programmer. Ten minutes of your development time saved is worth much 
more than 10 microseconds of runtime.

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