Creating immutable objects
In Ruby constant is mutable
MY_CONSTANT = "foo"
MY_CONSTANT << "bar"
p MY_CONSTANT
#=> "foo bar"
But with freeze, when you attempt to change the frozen object -> Runtime Error
MY_CONSTANT = "foo".freeze
MY_CONSTANT << " bar"
#=> `<main>': can't modify frozen String (RuntimeError)
Real-world example ActionDispatch codebase, Rails hides sensitive data by logging ‘[FILTERED]’ literal string, this text is stored in constant frozen.
module ActionDispatch
module Http
class ParametersFilter
FILTER = '[FILTERED]'.freeze
...
Reducing object allocation
One of best things to speed up Ruby on decrease number of objects are created. In your app, a method call log("foobar"), it is creating a String object. With freeze, Ruby interpreter will create only one String literal and caches it for feature use.
50% performance increase ```ruby require “benchmark/ips”
def noop arg end
Benchmark.ips do |x| x.report(“normal”){noop “foo”} x.report(“frozen”){noop “foo”.free} end
> Warming up --------------------------------------
normal 328.890k i/100ms
frozen 357.420k i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
normal 8.535M (± 2.4%) i/s - 42.756M in 5.012534s
frozen 10.428M (± 4.4%) i/s - 52.183M in 5.014607s
Real-world example, in Rails routes, the router is used for every request => freeze String literal.
```ruby
# excerpted from https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/f91439d848b305a9d8f83c10905e5012180ffa28/actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/journey/router/utils.rb#L15
def self.normalize_path(path)
path = "/#{path}"
path.squeeze!('/'.freeze)
path.sub!(%r{/+\Z}, ''.freeze)
path.gsub!(/(%[a-f0-9]{2})/) { $1.upcase }
path = '/' if path == ''.freeze
path
end
Ruby >= 2.2
Optimization is included in Ruby 2.2 and later. frozen string literal is used for hash key
user["name"] #Ruby 2.2
user["name".freeze] #Ruby 2.1