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Eliminating Intermediate Array Allocations
Recently I gave a talk at RailsWorld (hopefully they’ll post the video soon), and part of my presentation was about eliminating allocations in tokenizers. I presented a simple function for measuring allocations: def allocations x = GC.stat(:total_allocated_objects) yield GC.stat(:total_allocated_objects) - x end Everything in Ruby is an object, but not all objects actually make allocations. We can use the above function to measure allocations made in a block. Here are some examples of code that never allocate:
Recently I gave a talk at RailsWorld(hopefully they’ll post the video soon), and part of my presentation was about eliminating allocations in tokenizers. Literals like booleans, nil, symbols, integers, and floats are represented internally to CRuby as “tagged pointers” and they don’t allocate anything when executed. Should the time arrive when you need to write odd code for performance reasons, it will require knowledge, experience, and nuance that neither a linter nor an AI can provide.
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