[ruby-core:117240] [Ruby master Feature#20350] Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s

Issue #20350 has been reported by Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme). ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by byroot (Jean Boussier). To provide some data-point. Our monolith runs with https://github.com/Shopify/symbol-fstring, which makes the return value of `Symbol#to_s` frozen without any problem. I think we had to fix a single gem to make it work a few years back, that's it. That said, while we run a lot of code (700+ transitive gems), that's not necessarily fully representative of the code out there. Also one major difference with chilled string literals is that you can't just set `RUBYOPT="--disable-frozen-string-literal"` to continue running older code. I guess you could monkey patch `String#to_s` though, and provide that as a gem to make it easy to provide backward compatibility. All this to say that as a Ruby user, I'd like this change to happen, because `Symbol#to_s` is a major source of allocation, and Ruby performance is very GC dependent. But as a Ruby committer I think we need to be careful about the rate of deprecation and backward compatibility breaks. On one hand it would sound logical to ship such change at the same time as the change for frozen string literals, but on the other hand it makes the jump bigger and may alienate some users. So it's a fine line to walk. So I'm positive, but with some reservations. ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-107337 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). +1, I was thinking the same yesterday, that we could revisit `Symbol#to_s` and have a proper deprecation before changing it due to chilled strings landing. ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-107348 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). I added this to the dev meeting: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20336#note-8 ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-107805 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by ko1 (Koichi Sasada). `Symbol#name` returns frozen string. It is not enough? ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-107913 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by byroot (Jean Boussier).
`Symbol#name` returns frozen string. It is not enough?
It doesn't work well with duck typing. It's common to have a method that call `to_s` on the argument, and the argument can be a Symbol or another type: ```ruby def some_method(arg) arg = arg.to_s # do things end ``` We can debate the merits of such design of course, but from my experience it's extremely common. Years after `Symbol#name` introduction, `Symbol#to_s` remains visible on production profiles, and running https://github.com/Shopify/symbol-fstring/ still provide a small, but noticeable improvement. ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-107915 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto). I am in favor of experimenting. I am in favor of moving to immutable strings in the future if there are no significant incompatibility issues. Matz. ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-107979 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by jhawthorn (John Hawthorn). File Screenshot 2024-11-06 at 14.00.47.png added As one data point in favour of this we swapped Symbol#to_s for Symbol#name (`Symbol.alias_method :to_s, :name`) to GitHub.com last week and it reduced allocations by about 5% on our web requests. So there should be pretty significant savings to users if we can make this default.  ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-110454 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. ---Files-------------------------------- Screenshot 2024-11-06 at 14.00.47.png (118 KB) -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). Matz already approved this change above, so I think the only missing thing is a PR to implement it. It might be late to add this in 3.4 though, but it could be merged early in 3.5 dev. ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-110502 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. ---Files-------------------------------- Screenshot 2024-11-06 at 14.00.47.png (118 KB) -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Issue #20350 has been updated by byroot (Jean Boussier). We wrote the implementation with @etienne this morning: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/12065 No idea if we wish to include this for 3.4 or not though. People are already complaining quite a bit about various incompatibilities (`Hash#inspect`, `Backtrace::Location#to_s`, etc), so we might want to wait January. ---------------------------------------- Feature #20350: Return chilled string from Symbol#to_s https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20350#change-110581 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- During Ruby 2.7 development there was an attempt to return a frozen string from Symbol#to_s (#16150#note-22) This had to be rolled back due to incompatibility, but now we have chilled strings (#20205) Symbol#to_s can safely return a chilled string, giving developers time to fix warnings before switching to a frozen string. ---Files-------------------------------- Screenshot 2024-11-06 at 14.00.47.png (118 KB) -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/
participants (6)
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byroot (Jean Boussier)
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Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme)
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Eregon (Benoit Daloze)
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jhawthorn (John Hawthorn)
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ko1 (Koichi Sasada)
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matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)