81–90 of 131 posts
We learned nothing from Python 2->3 An obviously good change, actually massive performance improvements not hard to implement but its still gonna be such a headache and dependency hell
And since that flag really doesn't require lots of work in the VM, it's likely to be kept around pretty much forever.
The phrase “Frozen String Literals” is kind of weird to me. When I assign a string literal to a variable, I do not think of the variable itself as a “string literal.” That phrase is for the literal characters in between quotes in the code, which by definition are already “frozen.” They’re a static part of the code itself. This change makes it so that you cannot mutate a variable which was initialized using a string l…
Variables don't "contain" a string, they just point to objects on the heap.
So:
my_string = same_string = "Hello World"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also JavaScript.
Java too. Rust has only 99 string types, some of those are immutable also.
The standard library also has String, CString, CStr, OsString, and OsStr.
The latter four are for niche situations. 99.9% of the time, it's similar to Java: &str is Java's String, String is Java's StringBuffer/StringBuilder.
The phrase “Frozen String Literals” is kind of weird to me. When I assign a string literal to a variable, I do not think of the variable itself as a “string literal.” That phrase is for the literal characters in between quotes in the code, which by definition are already “frozen.” They’re a static part of the code itself. This change makes it so that you cannot mutate a variable which was initialized using a string l…
How does this work under the hood? Does Ruby keep a giant map of all strings in the application to check new strings against to see if it can dedupe? Does it keep a reference count to each unique string that requires a set lookup to update on each string instance’s deallocation? Set lookups in a giant set can be pretty expensive!
1. Strings have a flag (FL_FREEZE) that are set when the string is frozen. This is checked whenever a string would be mutated, to prevent it.
2. There is an interned string table for frozen strings.
> Does it keep a reference count to each unique string that requires a set lookup to update on each string instance’s deallocation?
This I am less sure about, I poked around in the implementation for a bit, but I am not sure of this answer. It appears to me that it just deletes it, but that cannot be right, I suspect I'm missing something, I only dig around in Ruby internals once or twice a year :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for a web-focused scripting language it makes sense to default to mutable strings Why do you say that? I would say the opposite.
Because there’ll likely be a lot of string concatenation in a language whose job is to output HTML. Adding a single char to a 1k string will require allocating a modified copy, in mutable strings it’s just appending in a preallocated buffer.
Ruby isn’t making all strings immutable here. Just string literals. You are free to allocate mutable strings that can be appended to, to your heart’s content. It is extremely rare that modifying a literal is intended behavior, since their contents are permanently persisted throughout the lifetime of your program. With your example, this would be like having one shared global buffer for your final document.
How does this work under the hood? Does Ruby keep a giant map of all strings in the application to check new strings against to see if it can dedupe? Does it keep a reference count to each unique string that requires a set lookup to update on each string instance’s deallocation? Set lookups in a giant set can be pretty expensive!
> How does this work under the hood? Does Ruby keep a giant map of all strings in the application to check new strings against to see if it can dedupe? 1. Strings have a flag (FL_FREEZE) that are set when the string is frozen. This is checked whenever a string would be mutated, to prevent it. 2. There is an interned string table for frozen strings. > Does it keep a reference count to each unique string that requires…
The interned string table uses weak references. Any string added to the interned string tables has the `FL_FSTR` flag set to it, and when a string a freed, if it has that flag the GC knowns to remove it from the interned string table.
The keyword to know to search for this in the VM is `fstring`, that's what interned strings are called internally:
- https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/b146eae3b5e9154d3fb692e8fe...
- https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/b146eae3b5e9154d3fb692e8fe...
Is it the future path of any successful JIT / dynamic typed / scripting language to realize they needed all optimizations from compiled / statically typed / lower level languages ? Would Ruby be as successful if they had all those complicated features right from the start ? Or do all languages start from a nice simple clean slate tabula rasa to get developers hooked, until the language is enough famous to get well de…
I would actually say it’s the opposite in this case: it’s extremely common in scripting languages for strings to be immutable, mutable strings are usually only available in lower level languages. I’m very surprised Ruby had this feature at all.