If you create 10,000 strings in a loop, a lot of garbage collection has to take place which uses up a lot of resources.
If you do the same thing with symbols, you create objects which cannot be garbage collected.
Which is worse?
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If you create 10,000 strings in a loop, a lot of garbage collection has to take place which uses up a lot of resources.
If you do the same thing with symbols, you create objects which cannot be garbage collected.
Which is worse?
Seeing as symbols are almost always created via literals, there isn’t much potential for a memory explosion here. Their behavior is pretty much required by their usage: every time you refer to a symbol, it’s the same one.
Similarly, strings need to be unique in Ruby. This is due to the way they’re used – text processing etc.
Decide which one to use depending on their semantics, don’t optimize prematurely.