Issue #22137 has been updated by matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto). Accepted. This is the planned conclusion of the chilled string deprecation introduced in 3.4 (#20350). Two release cycles of warnings, plus the field experience from large codebases running with the frozen behavior, give me enough confidence that the compatibility impact is small. Matz. ---------------------------------------- Feature #22137: Change `Symbol#to_s` to return frozen strings https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/22137#change-118001 * Author: byroot (Jean Boussier) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- Since Ruby 3.4 ([Feature #20350]) `Symbol#to_s` returns a chilled string, meaning mutating it emits a deprecation warning. I believe it's now time to act on this deprecation, I'd like to request that on Ruby 4.1, `Symbol#to_s` always return a frozen string. Several very large codebases include Shopify and GitHub have been running with `Symbol.alias_method(:to_s, :name)` without any compatibility issues whatsoever. Making this change would allow to progressively get rid of an annoying pattern in performance sensitive code: ```ruby arg.is_a?(Symbol) ? arg.name : arg.to_s ``` -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/